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Two scales in asynchronous ballistic annihilation

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Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation E Ben-Naim et al 1996 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 29 L561 DOI 10.1088/0305-4470/29/22/002

0305-4470/29/22/L561

Abstract

The kinetics of single-species annihilation, , is investigated in which each particle has a fixed velocity which may be either with equal probability, and a finite diffusivity. In one dimension, the interplay between convection and diffusion leads to a decay of the density which is proportional to . At long times, the reactants organize into domains of right- and left-moving particles, with the typical distance between particles in a single domain growing as , and the distance between domains growing as t. The probability that an arbitrary particle reacts with its nth neighbour is found to decay as for same-velocity pairs and as for +- pairs. These kinetic and spatial exponents and their interrelations are obtained by scaling arguments. Our predictions are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.

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10.1088/0305-4470/29/22/002