Speaker
Description
The Einstein Telescope (ET) will enable precision studies of large populations of compact-binary sources, making robust astrophysical modelling of dynamical formation channels increasingly important. In this contribution, we present first results from DRAGON-III, a new suite of realistic million-body direct N-body simulations of globular and nuclear star clusters evolved over cosmic time. Building on DRAGON-II, these models combine up-to-date stellar evolution with NBODY6++GPU, include primordial soft/wide binaries, and follow escapers in a Galactic tidal field. In the first ~100 Myr of one globular-cluster simulation, we obtain 41 pulsars, 191 X-ray binaries, 17 gravitational-wave sources, and one black-hole binary merger driven by gravitational-wave energy loss. The inclusion of initial soft binaries also produces unexpected compact-object systems, including an IMBH in a BH-BH binary and wide BH-star binaries resembling recently observed systems. These early results highlight dense star clusters as efficient factories of compact objects and dynamically assembled binaries relevant to the ET era. Ongoing DRAGON-III runs toward 10 Gyr, larger particle numbers, and nuclear-cluster configurations will provide an increasingly realistic framework for interpreting the demographics and environments of ET sources.