Heat conductivity from molecular chaos hypothesis in locally confined billiard systems

Thomas Gilbert, Raphael Lefevere

Published 2008-08-08, updated 2008-10-14Version 2

We study the transport properties of a large class of locally confined Hamiltonian systems, in which neighboring particles interact through hard core elastic collisions. When these collisions become rare and the systems large, we derive a Boltzmann-like equation for the evolution of the probability densities. We solve this equation in the linear regime and compute the heat conductivity from a Green-Kubo formula. The validity of our approach is demonstated by comparing our predictions to the results of numerical simulations performed on a new class of high-dimensional defocusing chaotic billiards.