Dynamical Evolution of Globular Clusters Moving within the Galactic Central Regions

The decaying of globular clusters towards galactic nuclei can be an efficient dynamical mechanism to concentrate high amounts of stellar matter in the very inner galactic regions, so to contribute significantly to the accretion and feeding of a central massive black hole. Such decaying is made possible by the dynamical friction which dissipates the cluster orbital kinetic energy in a reasonably short time. Quantitative indications that this mechanism is capable to sustain the observed AGN luminosities have been already given. However, there is need of a more refined numerical approach. In particular, while in normal conditions dynamical friction is well understood and its effects sufficiently well described, it is not clear what happens when a cluster decays into a region which ``encloses'' a bulge mass comparable with that of the cluster itself. In this case the gravitational feed-back of the cluster on the bulge is very important and cannot be neglected. Moreover, it is quite difficult to predict, by just analytical means, the tidal effects due to the presence of the massive black hole on clusters' dynamics. We want to show the results obtained by our simulations in this context. The simulations have been performed both with a serial and a parallel `tree-code' (on a CRAY T3E), using a leap-frog scheme for the integration of particles' trajectories, with individual and variable time steps. A completely self-consistent particle representation has been used, not only for the globular cluster but also for the nuclear region of the bulge and for the massive black hole.