Diffusion in a periodic Lorentz gas with narrow tunnels (P. Balint, N. Chernov, and D. Dolgopyat)

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Nikolai Chernov, University of Alabama, Birmingham

In a periodic Lorentz gas a particle moves bouncing off a regular array of fixed convex obstacles (scatterers), like in a pinball machine. When the horizon is finite, one observes a classical diffusion law. When the obstacles are so large that the tunnels between them become narrow (of width ϵ0) then the diffusion matrix scales with ϵ. In the limit, when ϵ=0, the particle is trapped in a compact region with cusps in the boundary. In that case the system ceases to be uniformly hyperbolic and develops anomalies. Correlations decay slowly, as 1/n, and the classical central limit theorem fails. Instead, a non-classical limit law holds, with a scaling factor of nlogn replacing the standard n. However, for a special observables whose average values at the cusps vanish, the classical central limit law still holds.