The circumnuclear disc (CND) orbiting the Galaxy's central black hole is a reservoir of material that can ultimately provide energy through accretion, or form stars in the presence of the black hole, as evidenced by the stellar cluster that is presently located at the CND's centre. In this paper, we report the results of a computational study of the dynamics of the CND. The results lead us to question two paradigms that are prevalent in previous research on the Galactic Centre. The first is that the disc's inner cavity is maintained by the interaction of the central stellar cluster's strong winds with the disc's inner rim, and secondly, that the presence of unstable clumps in the disc implies that the CND is a transient feature. Our simulations show that, in the absence of a magnetic field, the interaction of the wind with the inner disc rim actually leads to a filling of the inner cavity within a few orbital time-scales, contrary to previous expectations. However, including the effects of magnetic fields stabilizes the inner disc rim against rapid inward migration. Furthermore, this interaction causes instabilities that continuously create clumps that are individually unstable against tidal shearing. Thus the occurrence of such unstable clumps does not necessarily mean that the disc is itself a transient phenomenon. The next steps in this investigation are to explore the effect of the magnetorotational instability on the disc evolution and to test whether the results presented here persist for longer time-scales than those considered here.

We investigate the orbital evolution of an initially thin stellar disc around a supermassive black hole, considering various perturbative sources of gravity. By means of direct numerical N-body modelling, we first focus on the case when the disc is embedded in an extended spherically symmetric star cluster. We find that the gravitational influence of the disc triggers formation of macroscopic non- spherical substructure in the cluster which, subsequently, significantly affects the evolution of the disc itself. In another approximation, when the cluster is emu- lated by an analytic spherically symmetric potential, we further consider pertur- bative gravitational influence of a distant axisymmetric source. Using standard perturbation methods, we derive a simple semi-analytic model for such a config- uration. It turns out that the additional axisymmetric potential leads to mutual gravitational coupling of the individual orbits from the disc. Consequently, the dense parts of the disc can, for some period of time, evolve coherently. Finally, we apply some of our results to the young stellar disc which is observed in the innermost parsec of the Galactic Centre. 1