Particle transport at arbitrary timescales with Poisson-distributed collisions

Abstract

We develop a model to investigate the time evolution of the mean location and variance of a random walker subject to Poisson-distributed collisions at constant rate. The collisions are instantaneous velocity changes where a new value of velocity is generated from a model probability function. The walker is persistent, which means that it moves at constant velocity between collisions. We study three different cases of velocity transition functions and compute the transport properties from the evolution of the variance. We observe that transport can change character over time and that early times show features that, in general, depend on the initial conditions of the walker.