The Boltzmann-Grad limit of the periodic Lorentz gas

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a point particle in a periodic array of spherical scatterers and construct a stochastic process that governs the time evolution for random initial data in the limit of low scatterer density (Boltzmann-Grad limit). A generic path of the limiting process is a piecewise linear curve whose consecutive segments are generated by a Markov process with memory two.