Diffusion of particles bouncing on a one-dimensional periodically corrugated floor.

We report on a class of spatially extended mechanical systems sustaining a transport process of diffusive type. These systems consist of a point particle subject to a constant vertical acceleration and bouncing on a one-dimensional periodically corrugated floor. We show that the deterministic dynamics of these systems is chaotic with small elliptic islands for many parameter values. The motion of particles perturbed by a small noise has a horizontal diffusion that is normal. In such a case, we show that the diffusion coefficient oscillates periodically as the energy of particles increases. In the absence of noise, there still exists an effective numerical value for the diffusion coefficient and this value has an irregular dependence on energy.