On an empirical method to build near-equilibrium axisymmetric and triaxial galaxy models

Abstract

We introduce a numerical technique to implement $N-$body realizations of axisymmetric and triaxial self-gravitating system starting from a spherical self-consistent models for which a phase-space distribution is known. The method is an improvement of the so-called adiabatic squeezing technique and allows one to have a better control of the effective ellipticities of the particle distribution and produces virialized systems that can be used as non-spherical initial conditions for $N-$body simulations. Some numerical stability tests are presented and discussed.