English

Statistical properties of sites visited by independent random walks

Statistical Mechanics 2022-11-23 v3 Probability

Abstract

The set of visited sites and the number of visited sites are two basic properties of the random walk trajectory. We consider two independent random walks on a hyper-cubic lattice and study ordering probabilities associated with these characteristics. The first is the probability that during the time interval (0,t), the number of sites visited by a walker never exceeds that of another walker. The second is the probability that the sites visited by a walker remain a subset of the sites visited by another walker. Using numerical simulations, we investigate the leading asymptotic behaviors of the ordering probabilities in spatial dimensions d=1,2,3,4. We also study the evolution of the number of ties between the number of visited sites. We show analytically that the average number of ties increases as a1lnta_1\ln t with a1=0.970508a_1=0.970508 in one dimension and as (lnt)2(\ln t)^2 in two dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.00067,
  title  = {Statistical properties of sites visited by independent random walks},
  author = {E. Ben-Naim and P. L. Krapivsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.00067},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

11 pages, 12 figures; v2: minor amendments, refs added; v3: corrected typos