The K-Property of Hamiltonian Systems with Restricted Hard Ball Interactions The K-Property of Hamiltonian Systems with Restricted Hard Ball Interactions

N. Simányi and D. Szász:

The K-Property of Hamiltonian Systems with Restricted Hard Ball Interactions

The ergodicity (K-mixing property) of the motion of $N$ elastically colliding hard spheres in the $\nu$-dimensional ($\nu\ge 4$) flat torus $\Bbb T^{\nu}$ is established if the hard-core interaction is the cyclic one, i. e. the i-th ball only interacts with the $i\pm 1$-st ones. (The indices are counted modulo $N$.) In the case $\nu=3$ we get that the system has (countably many) {\it open} ergodic components, and the Lyapunov exponents are almost everywhere non-zero. The studied cyclic interaction covers the so called {\it pencase model} of Chernov and Sinai, that is, the billiard system of $N$ hard balls in an elongated torus, so that the balls cannot change their cyclic order in the elongated direction.