Gravitational force in weakly correlated particle spatial distributions

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2004 Mar;69(3 Pt 1):031110. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.69.031110. Epub 2004 Mar 30.

Abstract

We study the statistics of the gravitational (Newtonian) force in a particular class of weakly correlated spatial distributions of pointlike and unitary mass particles generated by the so-called Gauss-Poisson point processes. In particular we extend to these distributions the analysis that Chandrasekhar introduced for purely Poisson processes. In this way we can find the explicit asymptotic behavior of the probability density function of the force for both large and small values of the field as a generalization of the Holtzmark statistics. In particular, we show how the modifications at large fields depend on the density correlations introduced at small scales. The validity of the introduced approximations is positively tested through a direct comparison with the analysis of the statistics of the gravitational force in numerical simulations of Gauss-Poisson processes.