Reflecting Random Flights

Abstract

We consider random flights in $\mathbb{R}^d$ reflecting on the surface of a sphere $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}_R,$ with center at the origin and with radius $R,$ where reflection is performed by means of circular inversion. Random flights studied in this paper are motions where the orientation of the deviations are uniformly distributed on the unit-radius sphere $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}_1$. We obtain the explicit probability distributions of the position of the moving particle when the number of changes of direction is fixed and equal to $n\geq 1$. We show that these distributions involve functions which are solutions of the Euler-Darboux-Poisson equation. The unconditional probability distributions of the reflecting random flights are obtained by suitably randomizing $n$ by means of a fractional-type Poisson process. Random flights reflecting on hyperplanes according to the optical reflection form are considered and the related distributional properties derived.