English

Statistics of Long-Range Force Fields in Random Environments: Beyond Holtsmark

Statistical Mechanics 2023-06-29 v1

Abstract

Since the times of Holtsmark (1911), statistics of fields in random environments have been widely studied, for example in astrophysics, active matter, and line-shape broadening. The power-law decay of the two-body interaction, of the form 1/rδ1/|r|^\delta, and assuming spatial uniformity of the medium particles exerting the forces, imply that the fields are fat-tailed distributed, and in general are described by stable L\'evy distributions. With this widely used framework, the variance of the field diverges, which is non-physical, due to finite size cutoffs. We find a complementary statistical law to the L\'evy-Holtsmark distribution describing the large fields in the problem, which is related to the finite size of the tracer particle. We discover bi-scaling, with a sharp statistical transition of the force moments taking place when the order of the moment is d/δd/\delta, where dd is the dimension. The high-order moments, including the variance, are described by the framework presented in this paper, which is expected to hold for many systems. The new scaling solution found here is non-normalized similar to infinite invariant densities found in dynamical systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.16319,
  title  = {Statistics of Long-Range Force Fields in Random Environments: Beyond Holtsmark},
  author = {Avraham Samama and Eli Barkai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.16319},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

9 pages 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:17:00.817Z