0
$\begingroup$

I would like to be able to describe a particles path before collisions with greater precision. We can calculate the "mean" free path of a particle before colliding moving particles, but I can't find anything about the standard deviation of these paths.

Being able to calculate the standard deviation would allow us to answer questions like "what is the chance a particle undergoes a collision in some time interval $t$" and the like.

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
2
  • $\begingroup$ "what is the chance a particle undergoes a collision in some time interval t" This is given by $t$ in $e^{\frac{-t}{\tau}}$ where $\tau$ is the average time between collisions. No statistics is necessary. You can see a derivation of this in most introductory thermodynamics texts. Similar in principle to derivation of the MFP. In fact, you can multiply $\tau$ by the average velocity to get the MFP. $\endgroup$
    – joseph h
    Commented Mar 12 at 6:48
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @josephh due to the probability of a collision being proportional to the relative velocity between particles, at large times the distribution is not poissonian: google.com/… arxiv.org/abs/0801.2728 $\endgroup$
    – Syrocco
    Commented Mar 12 at 8:24

0

Reset to default