English

Fractional diffusion as the limit of a short range potential Rayleigh gas

Analysis of PDEs 2025-11-04 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP Probability

Abstract

The fractional diffusion equation is rigorously derived as a scaling limit from a deterministic Rayleigh gas, where particles interact via short range potentials with support of size ε\varepsilon and the background is distributed in space R3\mathbb{R}^3 according to a Poisson process with intensity NN and in velocity according to some fat-tailed distribution. As an intermediate step a linear Boltzmann equation is obtained in the Boltzmann-Grad limit as ε\varepsilon tends to zero and NN tends to infinity with Nε2=cN \varepsilon^2 =c. The convergence of the empiric particle dynamics to the Boltzmann-type dynamics is shown using semigroup methods to describe probability measures on collision trees associated to physical trajectories in the case of a Rayleigh gas. The fractional diffusion equation is a hydrodynamic limit for times t[0,T]t \in [0,T], where TT and inverse mean free path cc can both be chosen as some negative rational power εk\varepsilon^{-k}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.19025,
  title  = {Fractional diffusion as the limit of a short range potential Rayleigh gas},
  author = {Karsten Matthies and Theodora Syntaka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19025},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

43 pages. Corrected errors and improved results