Normal and Anomalous Diffusion in Soft Lorentz Gases

Abstract

Motivated by electronic transport in graphene-like structures, we study the diffusion of a classical point particle in Fermi potentials situated on a triangular lattice. We call this system a soft Lorentz gas, as the hard disks in the conventional periodic Lorentz gas are replaced by soft repulsive scatterers. A thorough computational analysis yields both normal and anomalous (super) diffusion with an extreme sensitivity on model parameters. This is due to an intricate interplay between trapped and ballistic periodic orbits, whose existence is characterized by tongue-like structures in parameter space. These results hold even for small softness showing that diffusion in the paradigmatic hard Lorentz gas is not robust for realistic potentials, where we find an entirely different type of diffusion.