Someone recommended asking in here instead of Physics.SE since it is more of a probability question than anything purely physical:
I have a finite and discrete 1D chain (edit: linear chain, i.e. a straight line) of atoms, with unit separation, with a set number of impurities randomly distributed in the place of these atoms in the system. What I would like to do is describe the separation between neighbouring impurities (call it "D" which will always be an integer) statistically, and also to work out the average separation .
For example, the plot below was calculated from several thousand simulations of a chain of length 200 atoms and 10 impurities where the y-axis is the probability $P(D)$ of finding an impurity at distance D, and the x-axis is nearest impurity distance $D$. It kind of looks like a Poisson distributon, which one would expect since the system is discrete and random and a kind of counting exercise, but it doesn't work to well as a fit to the data points. It has been a long time since I did any statistics so I'm not sure how to start expressing what I found mathematically. Since I know the system length ($L = 200$) and the number of impurities ($N_i$) is a fair starting point the impurity density $\rho = N_i/L$ ?
EDIT: The chain isn't allowed to self-intersect, it's a straight line in each case. The system I'm using above is a straight line of 200 evenly spaced atoms, and I'm distributing 10 impurities in the place of random atoms (e.g. at sites 4, 11, 54,...so there are still discrete steps between sites). The graph above is the result of finding the spacings between these impurity sites.
EDIT 2: Attached a picture at the top
EDIT 3: A poster in Physics.SE suggested it might be a geometrical distribution when the system size becomes very big. Is there any way to describe my distribution for this smaller system however?