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 , 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 . We also show that the arrangement of scatterers is imprinted in the shape of the distribution.
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