Staggering domino-like blast front motion in a one-dimensional cold gas (opens in new tab)

One-dimensional alternating particle systems are widely used to study interconnections between the hydrodynamics of blast waves in a gas-like medium and the Newtonian dynamics of its corpuscular constituents. We study the model in which point particles with masses $m,\mu, m,\mu,\dots, (m\geq\mu)$ are distributed on the positive half-line $\mathbb{R}_{+}$. Their dynamics are initiated by giving a positive velocity to the leftmost particle; in its...