Breaking down the Fermi acceleration with inelastic collisions

Abstract

The phenomenon of Fermi acceleration is addressed for a dissipative bouncing ball model with external stochastic perturbation. It is shown that the introduction of energy dissipation (inelastic collisions of the particle with the moving wall) is a sufficient condition to break down the process of Fermi acceleration. The phase transition from bounded to unbounded energy growth in the limit of vanishing dissipation is characterized.