English

Toward the full short-time statistics of an active Brownian particle on the plane

Statistical Mechanics 2020-08-19 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We study the position distribution of a single active Brownian particle (ABP) on the plane. We show that this distribution has a compact support, the boundary of which is an expanding circle. We focus on a short-time regime and employ the optimal fluctuation method (OFM) to study large deviations of the particle position coordinates xx and yy. We determine the optimal paths of the ABP, conditioned on reaching specified values of xx and yy, and the large deviation functions of the marginal distributions of xx, and of yy. These marginal distributions match continuously with "near tails" of the xx and yy distributions of typical fluctuations, studied earlier. We also calculate the large deviation function of the joint xx and yy distribution P(x,y,t)P(x,y,t) in a vicinity of a special "zero-noise" point, and show that lnP(x,y,t)\ln P(x,y,t) has a nontrivial self-similar structure as a function of xx, yy and tt. The joint distribution vanishes extremely fast at the expanding circle, exhibiting an essential singularity there. This singularity is inherited by the marginal xx- and yy-distributions. We argue that this fingerprint of the short-time dynamics remains there at all times.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.13547,
  title  = {Toward the full short-time statistics of an active Brownian particle on the plane},
  author = {Satya N. Majumdar and Baruch Meerson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.13547},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

12 pages including 8 figures