Relativistic Brownian motion: from a microscopic binary collision model to the Langevin equation.

The Langevin equation (LE) for the one-dimensional relativistic Brownian motion is derived from a microscopic collision model. The model assumes that a heavy pointlike Brownian particle interacts with the lighter heat bath particles via elastic hard-core collisions. First, the commonly known, nonrelativistic LE is deduced from this model, by taking into account the nonrelativistic conservation laws for momentum and kinetic energy.