Approach to a stationary state in an external field

Angel Alastuey (1) , Jaroslaw Piasecki (2)

1 Phys-ENS - Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS Lyon
2 Institute of Theoretical Physics [Warsaw]

We study relaxation towards a stationary out of equilibrium state by analizing a one-dimensional stochastic process followed by a particle accelerated by an external field and propagating through a thermal bath. The effect of collisions is described within Botlzmann's kinetic theory. We present analytical solutions for the Maxwell gas and for the very hard particle model. The exponentially fast relaxation of the velocity distribution toward the stationary form is demonstrated. In the reference frame moving with constant drift velocity the hydrodynamic diffusive mode is shown to govern the distribution in the position space. We show that the exact value of the diffusion coefficient for any value of the field is correctly predicted by Green-Kubo autocorrelation formula generalized to the stationary state.

Mots clés: hydrodynamic mode; diffusion; Green-Kubo formula; stationary state; out-of-equilibrium; relaxation processes

Domaines: Mécanique statistique [cond-mat.stat-mech]

Angel Alastuey, Jaroslaw Piasecki. Approach to a stationary state in an external field. Journal of Statistical Physics, 2010, 139, pp.991-1012. ⟨10.107/s10955-010-9976-x⟩. ⟨hal-00461276⟩