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Quantifying how spatial disorder affects the movement of a diffusing particle or agent is fundamental to target search studies. When diffusion occurs on a network, that is on a highly disordered environment, we lack the mathematical tools…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-08-15 Daniel Marris , Chittaranjan Hens , Subrata Ghosh , Luca Giuggioli

Let a lattice gas of constant density, described by the symmetric simple exclusion process, be brought in contact with a "target": a spherical absorber of radius $R$. Employing the macroscopic fluctuation theory (MFT), we evaluate the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-22 Baruch Meerson , Arkady Vilenkin , P. L. Krapivsky

Constrained diffusions in convex polyhedral domains with a general oblique reflection field, and with a diffusion coefficient scaled by a small parameter, are considered. Using an interior Dirichlet heat kernel lower bound estimate for…

Probability · Mathematics 2013-08-19 Amarjit Budhiraja , Zhen-Qing Chen

Motivated by the diffusion-reaction kinetics on interstellar dust grains, we study a first-passage problem of mortal random walkers in a confined two-dimensional geometry. We provide an exact expression for the encounter probability of two…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-10-02 Ingo Lohmar , Joachim Krug

The canonical model of stochastic search tracks a randomly diffusing "searcher" until it finds a "target." Owing to its many applications across science and engineering, this perennially popular problem has been thoroughly investigated in a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-01-14 Hwai-Ray Tung , Sean D Lawley

The statistics of first-passage times of random walks to target sites has proved to play a key role in determining the kinetics of space exploration in various contexts. In parallel, the number of distinct sites visited by a random walker…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-03-23 J. Klinger , A. Barbier-Chebbah , R. Voituriez , O. Bénichou

We derive an approximate formula for the mean first-passage time (MFPT) to a small absorbing target of arbitrary shape inside an elongated domain of a slowly varying axisymmetric profile. For this purpose, the original Poisson equation in…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2022-05-06 Denis S. Grebenkov , Alexei T. Skvortsov

The aim of this review is to provide a concise overview of some of the generic approaches that have been developed to deal with the statistical description of large systems of interacting dissipative 'units'. The latter notion includes,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-03-08 Eric Bertin

We consider the problem of identifying a sparse initial source condition to achieve a given state distribution of a diffusion-advection partial differential equation after a given final time. The initial condition is assumed to be a finite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-09 Umberto Biccari , Yongcun Song , Xiaoming Yuan , Enrique Zuazua

Diffusions are a successful technique to sample from high-dimensional distributions. The target distribution can be either explicitly given or learnt from a collection of samples. They implement a diffusion process whose endpoint is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Andrea Montanari

When does a diffusing particle reach its target for the first time? This first-passage time (FPT) problem is central to the kinetics of molecular reactions in chemistry and molecular biology. Here we explain the behavior of smooth FPT…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-11-24 A. Godec , R. Metzler

It has long been asserted that proteins like transcription factors may locate their target in DNA sequences at rates that surpass by several orders of magnitude the three-dimensional diffusion limit thank to facilitated diffusion, that is…

Biological Physics · Physics 2010-09-27 Ana-Maria Florescu , Marc Joyeux

We consider the boundary crossing problem for time-homogeneous diffusions and general curvilinear boundaries. Bounds are derived for the approximation error of the one-sided (upper) boundary crossing probability when replacing the original…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-08-28 A. N. Downes , K. Borovkov

In this paper we address the complexity of solving linear programming problems with a set of differential equations that converge to a fixed point that represents the optimal solution. Assuming a probabilistic model, where the inputs are…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Asa Ben-Hur , Joshua Feinberg , Shmuel Fishman , Hava T. Siegelmann

We analyze predator-prey dynamics in one dimension in which a Brownian predator adopts a chasing strategy that consists in stochastically resetting its current position to locations previously visited by a diffusive prey. We study three…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2019-12-05 J. Quetzalcoatl Toledo-Marin , Denis Boyer , Francisco J. Sevilla

The diffusion of a reactant to a binding target plays a key role in many biological processes. The reaction-radius at which the reactant and target may interact is often a small parameter relative to the diameter of the domain in which the…

Subcellular Processes · Quantitative Biology 2016-10-26 Sam Isaacson , Ava Mauro , Jay Newby

Single-molecule localization microscopy allows practitioners to locate and track labeled molecules in biological systems. When extracting diffusion coefficients from the resulting trajectories, it is common practice to perform a linear fit…

Biological Physics · Physics 2024-06-19 Jakob Tómas Bullerjahn , Gerhard Hummer

We calculate the survival probability of a stationary target in one dimension surrounded by diffusive or subdiffusive traps of time-dependent density. The survival probability of a target in the presence of traps of constant density is…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2007-05-23 S. B. Yuste , J. J. Ruiz-Lorenzo , Katja Lindenberg

We derive an approximate but fully explicit formula for the mean first-passage time (MFPT) to a small absorbing target of arbitrary shape in a general elongated domain in the plane. Our approximation combines conformal mapping, boundary…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-10-14 Denis S. Grebenkov , Alexei T. Skvortsov

We investigate how confinement may drastically change both the probability density of the first-encounter time and the related survival probability in the case of two diffusing particles. To obtain analytical insights into this problem, we…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2020-09-16 F. Le Vot , S. B. Yuste , E. Abad , D. S. Grebenkov