1. Introduction
The chemical evolution of a star like sun could be effectively explained by kinetic equations. The kinetic equations explain the rate of change of chemical composition of a star in terms of the thermonuclear reaction rates for destruction and production of the species involved. An arbitrary reaction is characterized by the rate of change
of a time dependent quantity
between the destruction rate
d and production rate
p. Here the destruction or production at time
t depends not only on
but also on the past history
of the variable
N. This may be formally represented by following [
1,
2]
where
denotes the function defined by
. It should be noted that
d and
p are functionals and Equation (
1) represents a functional-differential equation. If we consider a simplified form of Equation (
1) we could consider the decay rate of a radio-active substance which is given by a homogeneous differential equation
where
N is the number density of the radio-active substance and
λ is the decay constant. The solution of this differential equation with initial condition
at
is
If we consider a more general form of the differential Equation (
2) for the decay rate of a radio-active substance as
we have the solution of the form
where
a is a constant. One may get the solution in Equation (
3) from Equation (
5) as
. These types of problems arise in many experimental situations where one needs to switch from one family of functions to another family. In 2005, Mathai [
3,
4] introduced the pathway model by which one can switch among three different families of functions, say, type-1 beta families, type-2 beta families and gamma families. We get three different functional forms by varying the pathway parameter α. The pathway model in the real scalar case is defined as
where
.
and
are the normalizing constants when we consider the functions as statistical densities. The three different functional forms are respectively generalized type-1 beta, generalized type-2 beta and generalized gamma forms. By writing
, the generalized type-2 beta form can be obtained from generalized type-1 beta form. Both generalized type-1 beta form and generalized type-2 beta form reduce to generalized gamma form as
.
Due to this switching property, the pathway model has been widely used in many areas. In this paper, we use the pathway model to extend kinetic equations. The present paper is organized as follows: In the next section we discuss the extended kinetic equation and its solution with a brief description of the extended reaction rate probability integral. Connection of the extended kinetic equation with fractional calculus is examined in
Section 3. In
Section 4 we try to solve fractional kinetic equations and their various generalizations. Concluding remarks are given in
Section 5.
2. Extended Kinetic Equations
The following discussion is based on [
1,
2]. If we consider a production and destruction of nuclei in the proton-proton chain reaction, we can describe it by the equation
where
is the number density of the species
i over time. Here the summation is taken over all reactions, productions or destructions of the species
i. The number density
of the species
i can be expressed by the relation
where ρ is the mass density,
is the mass abundance,
is the Avogadro number and
is the mass of species
i in mass units. The mean life time
of species
i for destruction by species
j is given by the relation [
2]
where
is the decay rate of
i for interaction with
j.
denotes the reaction probability for an interaction involving species
i and
j defined as
where μ is the reduced mass of the particles given by
,
is the kinetic energy of the particles in the center of mass system. Consider the cross section
for low-energy non-resonant reactions given by
where
and
are the atomic numbers of the nuclei
i and
j,
e is the quantum of electric charge,
ℏ is the Planck’s quantum of action,
B the nuclear barrier height,
is the cross-section factor which is a slowly varying function of energy over a limited energy range and which can be characterized depending on the nuclear reaction. The density function of the relative velocities of the nuclei for a non-degenerate and non-relativistic gas is assumed to be Maxwell-Boltzmann given as
By substituting Equation (
11) and Equation (
10) in Equation (
9) the reaction probability
is obtained as
If a deviation from the thermodynamic equilibrium with regard to their velocities is considered then it results in a deviation from the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity. In this context, we consider a more general density function than Maxwell-Boltzmann density function by using the pathway model defined in Equation (
6). The pathway energy density function has the form
for
. Replacing the Maxwell-Boltzmann density Function Equation (
11) by the pathway energy density Equation (
13), we get the extended thermonuclear reaction probability integral in the form
Putting
and
we get
where
Following [
5], by taking the Mellin transform of Equation (
16) and simplifying, we get
where
. By taking the inverse Mellin transform we get,
where
L is a suitable contour which separates the poles of
and
from the poles of
. Putting
and using Legendre’s duplication formula [
6]
we get
where
is the
G-function originally introduced by C.S. Meijer in 1936, see [
5,
7,
8]. The
used in Equation (
21) converges for all
. The contour line
appearing in the integral in Equation (
20) is
to
for
so that all the poles of
and
lie to the left and all the poles of
lie to the right.
is evaluated as the sum of the residues at the poles of
and
.
In most of the cases the nuclear factor
used in Equation (
15) is approximately constant across the fusion window. Hence taking
for
and
and taking
we get
The following derivations are adapted from [
9]. From the Mellin-Barnes representation of the
G-function,
appearing in Equation (
20) with
, the poles of
are
the poles of
are
and the poles of
are
. Here the poles of
and
will coincide at all points except at
and hence the pole
is a pole of order 1,
are each of order 1 and
are each of order 2. The sum of residues corresponding to the pole
is given by
The sum of the residues corresponding to the poles
is
where
is the hypergeometric function defined by
where
The sum of the residues corresponding to poles
of order 2 can be obtained as follows:
where
We have
where
is a Psi function or digamma function (see Mathai [
5]) and
is Euler’s constant. Now
Then by using Equation (
25)–Equation (
27) we get,
where
and
Thus the series representation for the reaction probability is
where
and
are as defined in Equations (
29) and (30). For detailed theory of extended reaction rates and its series representations see Haubold and Kumar [
10,
11], Kumar and Haubold [
12].
The following discussion is adapted from [
1]. The solution of the differential Equation (
4) with initial condition
when
is
When
in Equation (
32) is a constant, the total number of reactions in the time interval
is obtained as
Now
is the probability that the lifetime of species
i is
when
t follows a distribution with density function
or we have
Equation (
34) is the Tsallis statistics for
, see [
13,
14] which can also be seen as a particular case of the pathway model Equation (
6) for
. If
in Equation (
32) is a function of time, say
, then it should be replaced by
. When
where
is independent of
t, then in this case
, then
where
The density in Equation (
34) is the lifetime density of the destruction of the species
i, with the expected mean value
where
is the expected value of
. The mean value of the lifetime density function given in Equation (
37) is
Now as
we get the expected mean lifetime
of the lifetime density function
considered by Haubold and Mathai [
1].
From the lifetime density function given in Equation (
34) and the mean lifetime Equation (
38) we can infer that
the expected lifetime of the species depends on the value of and α. As increases the expected lifetime decreases and vice versa.
can be interpreted as the amount of the net destruction in a small time interval . As the net destruction is faster the lifetime becomes smaller.