Heat transport in stochastic energy exchange models of locally confined hard spheres

Abstract

We study heat transport in a class of stochastic energy exchange systems that characterize the interactions of networks of locally trapped hard spheres under the assumption that neighbouring particles undergo rare binary collisions. Our results provide an extension to three-dimensional dynamics of previous ones applying to the dynamics of confined two-dimensional hard disks [Gaspard P & Gilbert T On the derivation of Fourier's law in stochastic energy exchange systems J Stat Mech (2008) P11021]. It is remarkable that the heat conductivity is here again given by the frequency of energy exchanges. Moreover the expression of the stochastic kernel which specifies the energy exchange dynamics is simpler in this case and therefore allows for faster and more extensive numerical computations.