English

Span observables - "When is a foraging rabbit no longer hungry?"

Statistical Mechanics 2024-09-20 v1 Quantitative Methods

Abstract

Be XtX_t a random walk. We study its span SS, i.e. the size of the domain visited up to time tt. We want to know the probability that SS reaches 11 for the first time, as well as the density of the span given tt. Analytical results are presented, and checked against numerical simulations. We then generalize this to include drift, and one or two reflecting boundaries. We also derive the joint probability of the maximum and minimum of a process. Our results are based on the diffusion propagator with reflecting or absorbing boundaries, for which a set of useful formulas is derived.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.06036,
  title  = {Span observables - "When is a foraging rabbit no longer hungry?"},
  author = {Kay Joerg Wiese},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.06036},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

11 pages, 14 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1807.08807

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:08:11.441Z