English

Diffusion with Stochastic Resetting

Statistical Mechanics 2015-05-27 v1

Abstract

We study simple diffusion where a particle stochastically resets to its initial position at a constant rate r. A finite resetting rate leads to a nonequilibrium stationary state with non-Gaussian fluctuations for the particle position. We also show that the mean time to find a stationary target by a diffusive searcher is finite and has a minimum value at an optimal resetting rate r^*. Resetting also alters fundamentally the late time decay of the survival probability of a stationary target when there are multiple searchers: while the typical survival probability decays exponentially with time, the average decays as a power law with an exponent depending continuously on the density of searchers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1102.2704,
  title  = {Diffusion with Stochastic Resetting},
  author = {Martin R. Evans and Satya N. Majumdar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.2704},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

4 pages revtex, 1 .eps figure included

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:25:44.416Z