Non Poissonian statistics in a low density fluid

Abstract

Our interest goes to the collisional statistics in an arbitrary interacting fluid. We show that even in the low density limit and contrary to naive expectation, the number of collisions experienced by a tagged particle in a given time does not obey Poisson law, and that conversely, the free flight time distribution is not a simple exponential. As an illustration, the hard sphere fluid case is worked out in detail. For this model, we quantify analytically those deviations and successfully compare our predictions against molecular dynamics simulations.

4 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Collision statistics of driven granular materials
• Granular gases: dynamics and collective effects
• Dynamics of a tracer granular particle as a non-equilibrium Markov process

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Interplay between an absorbing phase transition and synchronization in a driven granular system
• Is the mean free path the mean of a distribution?
• Dynamical and structural properties of an absorbing phase transition: a case study from granular systems
• Collision statistics in sheared inelastic hard spheres
• Collisional Statistics and Dynamics of 2D Hard-Disk Systems: From Fluid to Solid