Driven inelastic Maxwell gases

Abstract

We consider the inelastic Maxwell model, which consists of a collection of particles that are characterized by only their velocities, and evolving through binary collisions and external driving. At any instant, a particle is equally likely to collide with any of the remaining particles. The system evolves in continuous time with mutual collisions and driving taken to be point processes with rates $\tau_c^-{1}$ and $\tau_w^{-1}$ respectively. The mutual collisions conserve momentum and are inelastic, with a coefficient of restitution $r$. The velocity change of a particle with velocity $v$, due to driving, is taken to be $\Delta v=-(1+r_w) v+\eta$, mimicking the collision with a vibrating wall, where $r_w$ the coefficient of restitution of the particle with the "wall" and $\eta$ is Gaussian white noise. The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck driving mechanism given by $\frac{dv}{dt}=-\Gamma v+\eta$ is found to be a special case of the driving modeled as a point process. Using both the continuum and discrete versions we show that while the equations for the one-particle and the two-particle velocity distribution functions do not close, the joint evolution equations of the variance and the two-particle velocity correlation functions close. With the exact formula for the variance we find that, for $r_w\ne-1$, the system goes to a steady state. On the other hand, for $r_w=-1$, the system does not have a steady state. Similarly, the system goes to a steady state for the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck driving with $\Gamma\not=0$, whereas for the purely diffusive driving ($\Gamma=0$), the system does not have a steady state.