English

Time averages in continuous time random walks

Statistical Mechanics 2017-02-15 v3

Abstract

We investigate the time averaged squared displacement (TASD) of continuous time random walks with respect to the number of steps NN, which the random walker performed during the data acquisition time TT. We prove that the TASD, and as well the apparent diffusion constant, grow linearly with NN, provided the steps possess a fourth moment and can not accumulate in small intervals. Consequently, the fluctuations of the latter are dominated by the fluctuations of NN, and fluctuations of the walker's thermal history are irrelevant. Furthermore, we show that the relative scatter decays as 1/N1/\sqrt{N}, which suppresses all non-linear features in a plot of the TASD against the lag time. Parts of our arguments also hold for continuous time random walks with correlated steps.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.00988,
  title  = {Time averages in continuous time random walks},
  author = {Felix Thiel and Igor M. Sokolov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.00988},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

6 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:16:38.116Z