Heat conduction and Fourier's law by consecutive local mixing and thermalization.

We present a first-principles study of heat conduction in a class of models which exhibit a new multistep local thermalization mechanism which gives rise to Fourier's law. Local thermalization in our models occurs as the result of binary collisions among locally confined gas particles. We explore the conditions under which relaxation to local equilibrium, which involves no energy exchange, takes place on time scales shorter than that of the binary collisions which induce local thermalization. The role of this mechanism in multiphase material systems such as aerogels is discussed.