corner
corner

Phys. Rev. E 69, 031110 (2004) [8 pages]

Gravitational force in weakly correlated particle spatial distributions

Download: PDF (92 kB) Buy this article Export: BibTeX or EndNote (RIS)

Andrea Gabrielli
E. Fermi” Studies and Research Center, Via Panisperna 89 A, Compendio del Viminale, 00184 Rome, Italy

Adolfo Paolo Masucci
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” Piazzale Aldo Moro 2, I-00185 Rome, Italy
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di “Roma Tre,” Rome, Italy

Francesco Sylos Labini
Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, Université de Paris XI, Bâtiment 211, 91403 Orsay, France

Received 23 May 2003; revised 8 December 2003; published 30 March 2004

We study the statistics of the gravitational (Newtonian) force in a particular class of weakly correlated spatial distributions of pointlike and unitary mass particles generated by the so-called Gauss-Poisson point processes. In particular we extend to these distributions the analysis that Chandrasekhar introduced for purely Poisson processes. In this way we can find the explicit asymptotic behavior of the probability density function of the force for both large and small values of the field as a generalization of the Holtzmark statistics. In particular, we show how the modifications at large fields depend on the density correlations introduced at small scales. The validity of the introduced approximations is positively tested through a direct comparison with the analysis of the statistics of the gravitational force in numerical simulations of Gauss-Poisson processes.

© 2004 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.69.031110
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevE.69.031110
PACS:
05.40.-a, 95.30.Sf