Machta-Zwanzig regime of anomalous diffusion in infinite-horizon billiards (original) (raw)

We study diffusion on a periodic billiard table with an infinite horizon in the limit of narrow corridors. An effective trapping mechanism emerges according to which the process can be modeled by a Lévy walk combining exponentially distributed trapping times with free propagation along paths whose precise probabilities we compute. This description yields an approximation of the mean squared displacement of infinite-horizon billiards in terms of two transport coefficients, which generalizes to this anomalous regime the Machta-Zwanzig approximation of normal diffusion in finite-horizon billiards [J. Machta and R. Zwanzig, Phys. Rev. Lett. 50, 1959 (1983)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.50.1959].