Twice Scattered Particles in a Plane are Uniformly Distributed

Abstract

It was recently shown (Physica A 216:299–315, 1995) that in two dimensions the sum of three vectors each of whose lengths is exponentially distributed, whose direction is uniformly distributed and such that the sum of their lengths is l, is uniformly distributed on a disk of radius l. We state here this random walk result in terms of scattering of particles as follows: in two dimensions twice isotropically scattered particles by random (i.e., Poisson distributed) scatterers are uniformly distributed. We show that there is no other dimension d and no other number of scatterings s for which the corresponding result (i.e., uniform distribution on a d-dimensional sphere after s scatterings) holds.