A Huygens principle for diffusion and anomalous diffusion in spatially extended systems

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 110 (2013) 8411-8416.

Georg Gottwald and Ian Melbourne


Abstract

We present a universal view on diffusive behaviour in chaotic spatially extended systems for anisotropic and isotropic media. For anisotropic systems, strong chaos leads to diffusive behaviour (Brownian motion with drift) and weak chaos leads to superdiffusive behaviour (Lévy processes with drift). For isotropic systems, the drift term vanishes and strong chaos again leads to Brownian motion. We establish the existence of a nonlinear Huygens principle for weakly chaotic systems in isotropic media whereby the dynamics behaves diffusively in even space dimension and exhibits superdiffusive behaviour in odd space dimensions.


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