I will discuss a secular instability in eccentric stellar disks around
supermassive black holes. Coherent torques amplify deviations of individual
orbital eccentricities from the average, and thus drive all eccentricities
away from their initial value. I will consider applications to the Galactic
center, where massive stars are likely to form in eccentric disks around the
SgrA* black hole. I will show that the dynamical evolution of such a disk
results in several of its stars acquiring high (1-e much below 0.1) orbital
eccentricity. Binary stars on such highly eccentric orbits would get tidally
disrupted by the SgrA* black hole, possibly producing both S-stars, a
cluster of young stars on random orbits near the black hole, and
high-velocity stars in the Galactic halo.
