The approach to hard-sphere brownian motion: Variational eigenfunctions and evaluation of the Rayleigh-Fokker-Planck equation

We present detailed tabulations of the first few eigenfunctions of the hard-sphere energy scattering kernel for a test-particle in a background heat-bath. Calculations, for a range of heat bath/test particle mass-ratios between 18 and 11024, were carried out by a Rayleigh-Ritz method using the exact solutions of the hard-sphere Fokker-Planck equation as a basis set and supplement our previously-published results for the eigenvalues alone. The results, given as expansion coefficients in this representation thus also serve to verify the accuracy of the Fokker-Planck equation itself, the departure from this equation being reflected in the off-diagonal contributions in the Rayleigh-Ritz expansion eigenvectors.