English

Number of distinct sites visited by a resetting random walker

Statistical Mechanics 2022-06-08 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP Probability

Abstract

We investigate the number Vp(n)V_p(n) of distinct sites visited by an nn-step resetting random walker on a dd-dimensional hypercubic lattice with resetting probability pp. In the case p=0p=0, we recover the well-known result that the average number of distinct sites grows for large nn as V0(n)nd/2\langle V_0(n)\rangle\sim n^{d/2} for d<2d<2 and as V0(n)n\langle V_0(n)\rangle\sim n for d>2d>2. For p>0p>0, we show that Vp(n)\langle V_p(n)\rangle grows extremely slowly as [log(n)]d\sim \left[\log(n)\right]^d. We observe that the recurrence-transience transition at d=2d=2 for standard random walks (without resetting) disappears in the presence of resetting. In the limit p0p\to 0, we compute the exact crossover scaling function between the two regimes. In the one-dimensional case, we derive analytically the full distribution of Vp(n)V_p(n) in the limit of large nn. Moreover, for a one-dimensional random walker, we introduce a new observable, which we call imbalance, that measures how much the visited region is symmetric around the starting position. We analytically compute the full distribution of the imbalance both for p=0p=0 and for p>0p>0. Our theoretical results are verified by extensive numerical simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.04906,
  title  = {Number of distinct sites visited by a resetting random walker},
  author = {Marco Biroli and Francesco Mori and Satya N. Majumdar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.04906},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

41 pages, 8 figs