Relativistic Weierstrass random walks

Abstract

The Weierstrass random walk is a paradigmatic Markov chain giving rise to a Lévy-type superdiffusive behavior. It is well known that Special Relativity prevents the arbitrarily high velocities necessary to establish a superdiffusive behavior in any process occurring in Minkowski spacetime, implying, in particular, that any relativistic Markov chain describing spacetime phenomena must be essentially Gaussian. Here, we introduce a simple relativistic extension of the Weierstrass random walk and show that there must exist a transition time $t_c$ delimiting two qualitative distinct dynamical regimes: the (non-relativistic) superdiffusive Lévy flights, for $t<t_c$, and the usual (relativistic) Gaussian diffusion, for $t>t_c$. Implications of this crossover between different diffusion regimes are discussed for some explicit examples. The study of such an explicit and simple Markov chain can shed some light on several results obtained in much more involved contexts.

5 pages, final version to appear in PRE

References in corpus (3)

• Relativistic Brownian Motion
• Relativistic diffusion processes and random walk models
• Relativistic invariance of Lyapunov exponents in bounded and unbounded systems