Multiphase partitions of lattice random walks

DICMA, La Sapienza Università di Roma - Via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Roma, Italy

^(a) massimiliano.giona@uniroma1.it
^(b) davide.cocco@uniroma1.it

Received: 29 January 2019
Accepted: 25 May 2019

Abstract

Considering the dynamics of non-interacting particles randomly moving on a lattice, the occurrence of a discontinuous transition in the values of the lattice parameters (lattice spacing and hopping times) determines the uprisal of two lattice phases. In this letter we show that the hyperbolic hydrodynamic model obtained by enforcing the boundedness of lattice velocities derived in Giona M., Phys. Scr., 93 (2018) 095201 correctly describes the dynamics of the system and permits to derive easily the boundary condition at the interface, which, contrarily to the common belief, involves the lattice velocities in the two phases and not the phase diffusivities. The dispersion properties of independent particles moving on an infinite lattice composed by the periodic repetition of a multiphase unit cell are investigated. It is shown that the hyperbolic transport theory correctly predicts the effective diffusion coefficient over all the range of parameter values, while the corresponding continuous parabolic models deriving from Langevin equations for particle motion fail. The failure of parabolic transport models is shown via a simple numerical experiment.