Diffusivity in multiple scattering systems

Abstract We consider random flights of point particles inside n-dimensional channels of the form R ×Bn−k , where Bn−k is a ball of radius r in dimension n −k. The sequence of particle velocities taken immediately after each collision with the boundary of the channel comprise aMarkov chain whose transition probabilities operator P is determined by a choice of (billiard-like) randommechanical model of the particle-surface interaction at the “microscopic” scale. Markov operators obtained in this way are natural (definition below), which means, in particular, that (1) the (at the surface) Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution with a given surface temperature, when the surface model contains moving parts, or (2) the so-called Knudsen cosine law, when this model is purely geometric, is the stationary distribution of P . Our central concern is the relationship between the surface scattering properties encoded in P and the constant of diffusivity of a Brownian motion obtained by an appropriate limit of the random flight in the channel. We show by a suitable generalization of a central limit theorem of Kipnis and Varadhan how the diffusivity is expressed in terms of the spectrum of P and compute, in the case of 2-dimensional channels, the exact values of the diffusivity for a class of parametric microscopic surface models of the above geometric type (2).