Derivation of the Fick's law for the Lorentz model in a low density regime (Q2018328): Difference between revisions

The present work considers the mass transport in a Lorentz gas, i.e., in a system of non-interacting light particles which are scattered by other particles distributed in the matter. The whole system of scatterers and scattered particles is in contact with two mass reservoirs. One expects that under a suitable space-time scaling (in the hydrodynamic limit), a stationary mass current occurs in the system, which is proportional to the gradient of the mass density, i.e., which satisfies Fick's law. However, the rigorous proof of that fact is difficult and thus still an open problem. The authors of the present work try to prove the fact in case of low mass density. They start with the consideration of the transition from a mechanical system to the Boltzmann equation in the low-density regime. The problem of stationarity is handled in terms of a Neumann series. The transition from the Boltzmann equation to the diffusion equation is classical and ruled out by the Hilbert expansion method. Altogether, the authors ``show that, in a low density regime, there exists a unique stationary solution for the microscopic dynamics, which converges to the stationary solution of the heat equation, namely to the linear profile of the density. In the same region, the macroscopic current in the stationary state is given by Fick's law, with the diffusion coefficient determined by the Green-Kubo formula'' (from the authors' abstract).