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Equilibration, generalized equipartition, and diffusion in dynamical Lorentz gases
Fri 19 April 2013, 14:00
Stephan de Bievre
UFR de Math´ematiques et Laboratoire CNRS
Organiser: Nina Snaith
ABSTRACT
Joint work with P. Parris (Missouri).
We study approach to thermal equilibrium and diffusion in the fully Hamiltonian evolution
of a dynamical Lorentz gas, by which we mean an ensemble of particles moving through a
d-dimensional array of fixed soft scatterers that each possess an internal degree of freedom
to which moving particles locally couple. In our treatment, the temperature T to which the particles
equilibrate is defined through a fluctuation-dissipation-like relation that emerges naturally
from the microscopic Hamiltonian dynamics as a result of dynamical friction. In the equilibrated
state, particle motion is diffusive.