In this talk, I will present the result of high resolution numerical simulations of disk galaxies with various bulge/disk ratios evolving isolated, showing that:

• • Most of migration takes place when the bar strength is high and decreases in the phases of low activity (in agreement with the results by Brunetti et el. 2011, Minchev et al. 2011).

• • Most of the stars inside the corotation radius (CR) do not migrate in the outer regions, but stay confined in the inner disk, while stars outside CR can migrate either inwards or outwards, diffusing over the whole disk.

• • Migration is accompanied by significative azimuthal variations in the metallicity distribution, of the order of 0.1 dex for an initial gradient of ~-0.07 dex/kpc.

• • Boxy bulges are an example of stellar structures whose properties (stellar content, vertical metallicity, [α/Fe] and age gradients, ..) are affected by radial migration (see also Fig. 1).

We perform a set of high-resolution, fully self-consistent dissipationless N-body simulations to investigate the influence of cold dark matter (CDM) substructure on the dynamical evolution of thin galactic disks. Our method combines cosmological simulations of galaxy-sized CDM halos to derive the properties of substructure populations and controlled numerical experiments of consecutive subhalo impacts onto initially-thin, fully-formed disk galaxies. We demonstrate that close encounters between massive subhalos and galactic disks since z ~ 1 should be common occurrences in ΛCDM models. In contrast, extremely few satellites in present-day CDM halos are likely to have a significant impact on the disk structure. One typical host halo merger history is used to seed controlled N-body experiments of subhalo-disk encounters. As a result of these accretion events, the disk thickens considerably at all radii with the disk scale height increasing in excess of a factor of 2 in the solar neighborhood. We show that interactions with the subhalo population produce a wealth of distinctive morphological signatures in the disk stars, many of which resemble those being discovered in the Milky Way (MW), M31, and in other disk galaxies, including: conspicuous flares; bars; low-lived, ring-like features in the outskirts; and low-density, filamentary structures above the disk plane. These findings highlight the significant role of CDM substructure in setting the structure of disk galaxies and driving galaxy evolution.

We describe a made-to-measure algorithm (χ2M2M) for constructing N-particle models of stellar systems from observational data (De Lorenzi Debattista, Gerhard, et al. (2007)), extending earlier ideas by Syer & Tremaine (1996). The algorithm properly accounts for observational errors. We implemented this algorithm in a parallel code NMAGIC and carried out a sequence of tests to illustrate its power and performance: (i) We reconstructed an isotropic Hernquist (1990) model from density moments and projected kinematics including higher-order Gauss-Hermite moments (Gerhard (1993), van der Marel & Franx (1993)). We gave NMAGIC two initial models, made from distribution function (Debattista & Sellwood (2000)), with different density distributions to start with. While both recovered the correct differential energy distribution and intrinsic kinematics, that with density closer to the density of the final model had smaller final deviations from the target observables, and a narrower distribution of weights. (ii) We built a self-consistent oblate three-integral maximum rotator model and compared how the distribution function is recovered from integral field and slit kinematic data. In these experiments we gave the algorithm a difficult problem to solve. Since the target system was maximally rotating, the weights of all counter-rotating particles were zero. Using density observables and either slit or integral field kinematics, NMAGIC was asked to recover this maximally rotating model starting from an isotropic spherical system. A good fit to the kinematic constraint data was achieved. These experiments also showed the advantage of integral field data over slit data for constraining the model. The different applications show that the χ2M2M algorithm is practical, reliable and can be applied to various systems. High quality dynamical models of galaxies can be achieved which match targets to ~1σ for plausible uncertainties in the observables, and without symmetry restrictions. We conclude that χ2M2M holds great promise for unraveling the nature of galaxies.

The existing stellar kinematic evidence for massive black holes at the centers of galaxies is based on ≲ 30% discrepancies between constant M/L models and kinematic data. We show that asymmetries in the observed velocity distributions may introduce systematic errors in the data/model comparisons which are of the same order and have the same sign as these discrepancies. Existing modeling has so far failed to account properly for these asymmetries. Major axis data of M32 are analyzed as a specific example.

We simulate the chemical and dynamical evolution of the galactic bulge with the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. We calculate the early phase of galaxy formation in which the bulge is formed through a burst of star formation. The calculated abundance distribution function of stars in the bulge is consistent with the observations of bulge K giants, if the heavy element yields are three times larger than those expected from Salpeter's IMF.