English

Diffusion with stochastic resetting at power-law times

Statistical Mechanics 2016-06-22 v2

Abstract

What happens when a continuously evolving stochastic process is interrupted with large changes at random intervals τ\tau distributed as a power-law τ(1+α);α>0\sim \tau^{-(1+\alpha)};\alpha>0? Modeling the stochastic process by diffusion and the large changes as abrupt resets to the initial condition, we obtain {\em exact} closed-form expressions for both static and dynamic quantities, while accounting for strong correlations implied by a power-law. Our results show that the resulting dynamics exhibits a spectrum of rich long-time behavior, from an ever-spreading spatial distribution for α<1\alpha < 1, to one that is time independent for α>1\alpha > 1. The dynamics has strong consequences on the time to reach a distant target for the first time; we specifically show that there exists an optimal α\alpha that minimizes the mean time to reach the target, thereby offering a step towards a viable strategy to locate targets in a crowded environment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.02092,
  title  = {Diffusion with stochastic resetting at power-law times},
  author = {Apoorva Nagar and Shamik Gupta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.02092},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures. v2: Version published in Phys. Rev. E as a rapid comm., includes Suppl. Mat

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:03:21.976Z