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A Comprehensive Perturbative Formalism for Phase-Mixing in Perturbed Disks. I. Phase spirals in an Infinite, Isothermal Slab

Galactic disks are highly responsive systems that often undergo external perturbations and subsequent collisionless equilibration, predominantly via phase-mixing. We use linear perturbation theory to study the response of infinite isothermal slab analogues of disks to perturbations with diverse spatio-temporal characteristics. Without self-gravity of the response, the dominant Fourier modes that get excited in a disk are the bending and breathing modes, which, due to vertical phase-mixing, trigger local phase-space spirals that are one- and two-armed, respectively. We demonstrate how the lateral streaming motion of slab stars causes phase spirals to damp out over time. The ratio of the perturbation timescale ($τ_{\mathrm{P}}$) to the local, vertical oscillation time ($τ_z$) ultimately decides which of the two modes is excited. Faster, more impulsive ($τ_{\mathrm{P}} < τ_z$) and slower, more adiabatic ($τ_{\mathrm{P}} > τ_z$) perturbations excite stronger breathing and bending modes, respectively, although the response to very slow perturbations is exponentially suppressed. For encounters with satellite galaxies, this translates to more distant and more perpendicular encounters triggering stronger bending modes. We compute the direct response of the Milky Way disk to several of its satellite galaxies, and find that recent encounters with all of them excite bending modes in the Solar neighborhood. The encounter with Sagittarius triggers a response that is at least $1-2$ orders of magnitude larger than that due to any other satellite, including the Large Magellanic Cloud. We briefly discuss how ignoring the presence of a dark matter halo and the self-gravity of the response might impact our conclusions.