The effect of physically realizable wall potentials (soft walls) on the dynamics of two interacting particles in a one-dimensional (1D) billiard is examined numerically. The 1D walls are modeled by the error function and the transition from hard to soft walls can be analyzed continuously by varying the softness parameter $\sigma$. For $\sigma \to 0$ the 1D hard wall limit is obtained and the corresponding wall force on the particles is the $\delta$ function. In this limit the interacting particle dynamics agrees with previous results obtained for the 1D hard walls. We show that the two interacting particles in the 1D soft walls model is equivalent to one particle inside a soft right triangular billiard. Very small values of $\sigma$ substantiously change the dynamics inside the billiard and the mean finite-time Lyapunov exponent decreases significantly as the consequence of regular islands which appear due to the low-energy double collisions (simultaneous particle-particle-1D wall collisions). The rise of regular islands and sticky trajectories induced by the 1D wall softness is quantified by the number of occurrences of the most probable finite-time Lyapunov exponent. On the other hand, chaotic motion in the system appears due to the high-energy double collisions. In general we observe that the mean finite-time Lyapunov exponent decreases when $\sigma$ increases, but the number of occurrences of the most probable finite-time Lyapunov exponent increases, meaning that the phase-space dynamics tends to be more ergodiclike. Our results suggest that the transport efficiency of interacting particles and heat conduction in periodic structures modeled by billiards will strongly be affected by the smoothness of physically realizable walls.

• Received 11 June 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.78.046208