Paper detail

Impurity dynamics in a zero-temperature gas

If energy is suddenly released in a localized region of space uniformly filled with identical stationary hard spheres, the outcome is a blast with an asymptotically spherical shock wave separating moving and stationary hard spheres. The radius $R(t)$ of the region filled with the moving spheres grows as $t^{2/(d+2)}$, where $d$ is the spatial dimension. The simplest way to inject energy is to kick a few `impurity' particles. Using hydrodynamics and kinetic theory, we argue that the typical displacement of an impurity scales as $R_{\rm imp} \sim λ(R/λ)^{(4+3d^2)/(8+3d^2)}$, where $λ$ is the mean-free path in the initial state. The number of collisions experienced by each impurity grows as $(R/λ)^{(8+2d^2)/(8+3d^2)}$, while its average speed decreases as $t^{-d(8-2d+3d^2)/[(2+d)(8+3d^2)]}$. In $2D$, the predictions for impurity displacement, collision numbers, and speed are $t^{2/5},~t^{2/5}$ and $t^{-2/5}$, respectively. These predictions are in reasonable agreement with the results of molecular dynamics simulations.