From particles to fluids 5

Our contribution ends with a didactic part presented in Section 6. The whole program
of deriving kinetic and hydrodynamic equations from the particle dynamics, can be car-
ried out for linear systems. The basic dynamics is that of a single particle moving in a
(possibly random) distribution of scatterers. For this system one can prove (under suitable
scaling limits) a rigorous validation of a linear Boltzmann equation and, from this, of a dif-
fusion equation. It is also possible to show the diffusive behavior of the particle as proved
by Bunimovich and Sinai (see [17]) for a periodic distribution of obstacles. This result is
somehow fundamental: It shows that the heat equation (or the Brownian motion) is rig-
orously derivable from a mechanical system. Unfortunately this result is technically hard
because it makes use of the ergodic properties of Sinai’s billiard, so that we limit ourselves
to describe it qualitatively.

2. Euler equations from particle systems

The fundamental model we will consider is a system of N identical point particles of

mass m > 0 moving in Rd , d
1, roughly modeling the molecules of a d-dimensional
fluid. Although they are in their nature quantum objects, to our purposes their quantum
properties can be disregarded and therefore we assume they obey the rules of the Classical
Mechanics. In particular, this means that the configuration of the system is specified by the
coordinates qi and velocities vi , i = 1, . . . , N , with respect to a fixed inertial system. The
evolution of the system is given by the Newton equations:
dqi
(τ ) = vi (τ ),
dτ
(2.1)
dvi

(t) = − ∇φ(qi − qj ),
dτ
i
=j

where τ is the time, φ(r), r ∈ Rd , is the potential describing the interaction between the
particles, which we assume bounded, smooth, depending only on |r| and, for simplicity,
of compact support. Many of these assumptions can be suitably relaxed, but we do not
discuss here the possible generalizations. Finally, ∇φ denotes the gradient of φ with re-
spect to r. In the above equations we have assumed unit mass for each particle, because
this is a parameter which will be kept fixed in all the discussion. The variables q and τ are
measured in microscopic units. In view of the fact that we are going to look at the system
in the macroscopic space–time scale, it is convenient to introduce a parameter ε > 0 repre-
senting the ratio between a microscopic space scale (say the range of the interaction) and
a macroscopic one (say the diameter of the region where the fluid is confined). Then we
introduce the “macroscopic coordinates” xi = εqi , i = 1, . . . , N, and the “macroscopic
time” t = ετ . In terms of the macroscopic variables the Newton equations become

dxi
(t) = vi (t),
dt

  (2.2)
dvi xi − xj
(t) = −ε−1 ∇φ .
dt ε
i
=j