Abstract
We consider the pressureless Euler-Poisson equations with quadratic confinement. For spatial dimension d ≥ 2, d ≠ 4, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of radial global smooth solutions, which is formulated explicitly in terms of the initial data. This condition appears to be much more restrictive than the critical-threshold conditions commonly seen in the study of Euler-type equations. To obtain our results, the key observation is that every characteristic satisfies a periodic ODE system, and the existence of a global smooth solution requires the period of every characteristic to be identical.