Relativistic Brownian motion: From a microscopic binary collision model to the Langevin equation

Abstract

The Langevin equation (LE) for the one-dimensional relativistic Brownian motion is derived from a microscopic collision model. The model assumes that a heavy pointlike Brownian particle interacts with the lighter heat bath particles via elastic hard-core collisions. First, the commonly known, nonrelativistic LE is deduced from this model, by taking into account the nonrelativistic conservation laws for momentum and kinetic energy. Subsequently, this procedure is generalized to the relativistic case. There, it is found that the relativistic stochastic force is still delta correlated (white noise) but no longer corresponds to a Gaussian white noise process. Explicit results for the friction and momentum-space diffusion coefficients are presented and discussed.