Journal
EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL-SPECIAL TOPICS
Volume 228, Issue 1, Pages 143-160Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1140/epjst/e2019-800136-8
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Funding
- Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT) [262481]
- Office of Naval Research Global
- London Mathematical Laboratory,
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The periodic Lorentz gas is a paradigmatic model to examine how macroscopic transport emerges from microscopic chaos. It consists of a triangular lattice of circular hard scatterers with a moving point particle. Recently this system became relevant as a model for electronic transport in low-dimensional nanosystems such as molecular graphene. However, to more realistically mimic such dynamics, the hard Lorentz gas scatterers should be replaced by soft potentials. Here we study diffusion in a soft Lorentz gas with Fermi potentials under variation of the total energy of the moving particle. Our goal is to understand the diffusion coefficient as a function of the energy. In our numerical simulations we identify three different dynamical regimes: (i) the onset of diffusion at small energies; (ii) a transition where for the first time a particle reaches the top of the potential, characterized by the diffusion coefficient abruptly dropping to zero; and (iii) diffusion at high energies, where the diffusion coefficient increases according to a power law in the energy. All these different regimes are understood analytically in terms of simple random walk approximations.
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