Hyperbolic type transport equations

Abstract

In recent years hyperbolic type transport equations have acquired a great deal of importance in problems ranging from theoretical physics to biology. In spite of their greater mathematical difficulty as compared with their parabolic type analogs arising from the framework of Linear Irreversible Thermodynamics, they have, in many ways, superseded the latter ones. Although the use of this type of equations is well known since the last century through the telegraphist equation of electromagnetic theory, their use in studying several problems in transport theory is hardly fifty years old. In fact the first appearance of a hyperbolic type transport equation for the problem of heat conduction dates back to Cattaneos' work in 1948. Three years later, in 1951 S. Goldstein showed how in the theory of stochastic processes this type of an equation is obtained in the continuous limit of a one-dimensional persistent random walk problem. After that, other phenomenological derivations have been offered for such equations. The main purpose of this paper is to critically discuss a derivation of a hyperbolic type Fokker-Planck equation recently presented using the same ideas as M.S. Green did in 1952 to provide the stochastic foundations of irreversible statistical mechanics. Arguments are given to show that such an equation as well as transport equations derived from it by taking appropriate averages are at most approximate and that a much more detailed analysis is required before asserting their validity.