Galactic Merger Implications for Eccentric Nuclear Disks

Eccentric nuclear disks (ENDs) are regions around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) which contain a disk of stars on apsidally-aligned eccentric orbits. Previous studies of ENDs considered only an isolated disk, and did not study their dynamics under galaxy mergers (particularly a perturbing SMBH). Here, we present the first study of how ENDs are affected by a galactic merger. We perform N-body simulations to study the END under a range of different possible SMBH initial conditions and find certain conditions shut off differential precession of the END, leading to a clustering of eccentricity vectors. This results in a more aligned disk, nearly uniform eccentricity profile, and suppression of TDEs compared to the isolated END.