English

Diffusive behavior for randomly kicked Newtonian particles in a spatially periodic medium

Mathematical Physics 2015-05-14 v3 math.MP

Abstract

We prove a central limit theorem for the momentum distribution of a particle undergoing an unbiased spatially periodic random forcing at exponentially distributed times without friction. The start is a linear Boltzmann equation for the phase space density, where the average energy of the particle grows linearly in time. Rescaling time, the momentum converges to a Brownian motion, and the position is its time-integral showing superdiffusive scaling with time t3/2t^{3/2}. The analysis has two parts: (1) to show that the particle spends most of its time at high energy, where the spatial environment is practically invisible; (2) to treat the low energy incursions where the motion is dominated by the deterministic force, with potential drift but where symmetry arguments cancel the ballistic behavior.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0910.0984,
  title  = {Diffusive behavior for randomly kicked Newtonian particles in a spatially periodic medium},
  author = {Jeremy Clark and Christian Maes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.0984},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

55 pages. Some typos corrected from previous version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:54:40.206Z