Gravitational force in weakly correlated particle distributions

Abstract

We study the statistics of the gravitational (Newtonian) force in a particular kind of weakly correlated distribution of point-like and unitary mass particles generated by the so-called Gauss-Poisson point process. In particular we extend to these distributions the analysis a' la Chandrasekhar introduced for purely Poisson processes. In this way we can find the asymptotic behavior of the probability density function of the force for large values of the field as a generalization of the Holtzmark statistics. The validity of the introduced approximations is positively tested through a direct comparison with the analysis of the statistics of the gravitational force in numerical simulations of Gauss-Poisson processes. Moreover the statistics of the force felt by a particle due to only its first nearest neighbor is analytically a numerical studied, resulting to be the dominant contribution to the total force.