Stirring two grains of sand*

Consider two unit balls in a d-dimensional flat torus with edge length r, for d ≥ 2. The balls do not move by themselves but they are pushed by a Brownian motion. The balls never intersect—they reflect if they touch. It is proved that the joint distribution of the processes representing the centers of the balls converges to the distribution of two independent Brownian motions when r →∞, assuming that we use a proper clock and proper scaling. The diffusion coefficient of the limit process depends on the dimension. The positions of the balls are asymptotically independent also in the following sense. The rescaled stationary distributions of the centers of the balls converge to the product of the stationary (hence uniform) distributions for each ball separately, as r →∞.