Mortal Brownian motion: three short stories
Abstract
Mortality introduces an intrinsic time scale into the scale-invariant Brownian motion. This fact has important consequences for different statistics of Brownian motion. Here we are telling three short stories, where spontaneous death, such as radioactive decay, puts a natural limit to "lifetime achievements" of a Brownian particle. In story 1 we determine the probability distribution of a mortal Brownian particle (MBP) reaching a specified point in space at the time of its death. In story 2 we determine the probability distribution of the area of a MBP on the line. Story 3 addresses the distribution of the winding angle of a MBP wandering around a reflecting disk in the plane. In stories 1 and 2 the probability distributions exhibit integrable singularities at zero values of the position and the area, respectively. In story 3 a singularity at zero winding angle appears only in the limit of very high mortality. A different integrable singularity appears at a nonzero winding angle. It is inherited from the recently uncovered singularity of the short-time large-deviation function of the winding angle for immortal Brownian motion.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1903.03963,
title = {Mortal Brownian motion: three short stories},
author = {Baruch Meerson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03963},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
7 one-column pages, 4 figures, small changes