Two-dimensional gas

A two-dimensional gas is a collection of objects constrained to move in a planar or other two-dimensional space in a gaseous state. The objects can be: ideal gas elements such as rigid disks undergoing elastic collisions; elementary particles, or any object in physics which obeys laws of motion. The concept of a two-dimensional gas is used either because:

While physicists have studied simple two body interactions on a plane for centuries, the attention given to the two-dimensional gas (having many bodies in motion) is a 20th-century pursuit. Applications have led to better understanding of superconductivity, gas thermodynamics, certain solid state problems and several questions in quantum mechanics.

Research at Princeton University in the early 1960s posed the question of whether the Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics and other thermodynamic laws could be derived from Newtonian laws applied to multi-body systems rather than through the conventional methods of statistical mechanics. While this question appears intractable from a three-dimensional closed form solution, the problem behaves differently in two-dimensional space. In particular an ideal two-dimensional gas was examined from the standpoint of relaxation time to equilibrium velocity distribution given several arbitrary initial conditions of the ideal gas. Relaxation times were shown to be very fast: on the order of mean free time .

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