  Many important properties of granular fluids can be represented by a system
of hard spheres with inelastic collisions. Traditional methods of
nonequilibrium statistical mechanics are effective for analysis and description
of the inelastic case as well. This is illustrated here for diffusion of an
impurity particle in a fluid undergoing homogeneous cooling. An appropriate
scaling of the Liouville equation is described such that the homogeneous
cooling ensemble and associated time correlation functions map to those of a
stationary state. In this form the familiar methods of linear response can be
applied, leading to Green - Kubo and Einstein representations of diffusion in
terms of the velocity and mean square displacement correlation functions. These
correlation functions are evaluated approximately using a cumulant expansion
and from kinetic theory, providing the diffusion coefficient as a function of
the density and the restitution coefficients. Comparisons with results from
molecular dynamics simulation are given in the following companion paper.
