High energy collision without fine tuning: Acceleration and multiple collisions of shells in a bound system

Abstract

High energy collision of massive bodies is investigated without fine tuning. We study multiple collisions of two spherical concentric shells in a gravitationally bound system and calculate the center of mass energy between the shells. We solve the equation of motions for two shells without imposing any fine tuning of the initial parameters. In this bound system, the shells collide many times and these motions are highly nontrivial due to chaotic behavior of the shells. Consequently, the center of mass energy for each collision varies nontrivially and even reach almost its theoretical upper limit. We confirm that a significant proportion of the theoretical limit is automatically achieved during multiple collisions without fine tuning. At the same time, we also study shell ejection from the system after some collisions. If the initial shell's energy is large enough, multiple collisions may cause one shell to accumulate energy so that it escapes to infinity, even though two shells are initially confined in the system. The ejection is caused by multiple collisions inducing nontrivial energy transfer between the shells. The relation between the maximum center of mass energy and the energy transfer causing the shell ejection is also discussed.