English

Dispersion of particles in an infinite-horizon Lorentz gas

Statistical Mechanics 2018-07-18 v4

Abstract

We consider a two-dimensional Lorentz gas with infinite horizon. This paradigmatic model consists of pointlike particles undergoing elastic collisions with fixed scatterers arranged on a periodic lattice. It was rigorously shown that when tt\to\infty, the distribution of particles is Gaussian. However, the convergence to this limit is ultraslow, hence it is practically unattainable. Here we obtain an analytical solution for the Lorentz gas' kinetics on physically relevant timescales, and find that the density in its far tails decays as a universal power law of exponent 3-3. We also show that the arrangement of scatterers is imprinted in the shape of the distribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.04397,
  title  = {Dispersion of particles in an infinite-horizon Lorentz gas},
  author = {L. Zarfaty and A. Peletskyi and I. Fouxon and S. Denisov and E. Barkai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.04397},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Article with supplemental material: 10 pages, 4 figures