English

Diffusion in a partially absorbing medium with position and occupation time resetting

Statistical Mechanics 2022-07-13 v1 Probability

Abstract

In this paper we consider diffusion in a domain Ω\Omega containing a partially absorbing target \calM\calM with position and occupation time resetting. The occupation time AtA_t is a Brownian functional that determines the amount of time that the particle spends in \calM \calM over the time interval [0,t][0,t]. We assume that there exists some internal state \calUt\calU_t of the particle at time tt which is modified whenever the particle is diffusing within \calM\calM . The state \calUt\calU_t is taken to be a monotonically increasing function of AtA_t, and absorption occurs as soon as \calUt\calU_t crosses some fixed threshold. We first show how to analyze threshold absorption in terms of the joint probability density or generalized propagator P(\x,a,t\x0)P(\x,a,t|\x_0) for the pair (\Xt,At)(\X_t,A_t) in the case of a non-absorbing substrate \calM\calM, where \Xt\X_t is the particle position at time tt and \x0\x_0 is the initial position. We then introduce a generalized stochastic resetting protocol in which both the position \Xt\X_t and the internal state \calUt\calU_t are reset to their initial values, \Xt\x0\X_t\rightarrow \x_0 and \calUt0\calU_t\rightarrow 0, at a Poisson rate rr. The latter is mathematically equivalent to resetting the occupation time, At0A_t\rightarrow 0. Since resetting is governed by a renewal process, the survival probability with resetting can be expressed in terms of the survival probability without resetting, which means that the statistics of absorption can be determined by calculating the double Laplace transform of P(\x,a,t\x0)P(\x,a,t|\x_0) with respect to tt and aa. In order to develop the basic theory, we focus on one-dimensional (1D) diffusion with \calM\calM given by a finite or semi-infinite interval, and explore how the MFPT with resetting depends on various model parameters. We also compare the threshold mechanism with the classical case of a constant absorption rate.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.13989,
  title  = {Diffusion in a partially absorbing medium with position and occupation time resetting},
  author = {Paul C Bressloff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.13989},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

18 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:30:58.236Z