Statistical mechanics and equilibrium sequences of ellipticals

Elliptical galaxies are expected to have undergone incomplete violent relaxation. Here incomplete relaxation is regarded as a process producing a metastable, long-lived state which is stabilized by the approximate conservation of some set of global quantities in addition to the total energy and the number of particles. The final state corresponds to a maximum of the classical (Boltzmann) entropy provided that the proper phase space partition and set of constraints are chosen. Here two different ways of implementing these ideas are explored. (author)