Statistics of ballistic agglomeration

Abstract

We consider a ‘‘sticky gas’’ in which collisions between spherical particles are perfectly inelastic. Thus the two colliding particles conserve mass and momentum, but merge to form a single more massive sphere. A scaling argument suggests that the average mass of a particle grows as ${\mathit{t}}^{2\mathit{D}/(2+\mathit{D})}$, where D is the spatial dimension. In the case D=1 this result is confirmed by numerical simulation.