Diffusion and escape from polygonal channels: extreme values and geometric effects

Jordan Orchard, Lamberto Rondoni, Carlos Mejia-Monasterio, Federico Frascoli

Published 2021-04-08Version 1

Polygonal billiards are an example of pseudo-chaotic dynamics, a combination of integrable evolution and sudden jumps due to conical singular points that arise from the corners of the polygons. Even when pseudo-chaos is characterised by an algebraic separation of nearby trajectories, it is believed to be linked to the wild dependence that particle transport has on the fine details of billiards' shape. Here we address this relation by studying in detail the statistics of the particle's displacement in a family of polygonal open channels with parallel walls. We show that transport is characterised by strong anomalous diffusion, with a mean square displacement that scales in time faster than linear, and with a probability density of the displacement exhibiting exponential tails and ballistic fronts. In channels of finite length the distribution of first-passage time to escape the channel is characterised by fat tails, with a mean first-passage time that diverges when the aperture angle is rational. These findings have non trivial consequences for a variety of experiments.