English

Ageing effects in single particle trajectory averages

Statistical Mechanics 2012-04-05 v1 Biological Physics Quantitative Methods

Abstract

We study time averages of single particle trajectories in scale free anomalous diffusion processes, in which the measurement starts at some time t_a>0 after initiation of the process at the time origin, t=0. Using ageing renewal theory we show that for such non-stationary processes a large class of observables are affected by a unique ageing function, which is independent of boundary conditions or the external forces. We quantify the weakly non-ergodic nature of this process in terms of the distribution of time averages and the ergodicity breaking parameter which both explicitly depend on the ageing time t_a. Consequences for the interpretation of single particle tracking data are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1204.0878,
  title  = {Ageing effects in single particle trajectory averages},
  author = {Johannes Schulz and Eli Barkai and Ralf Metzler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.0878},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:44:27.726Z