English

Mortal Brownian motion: three short stories

Statistical Mechanics 2019-07-29 v2

Abstract

Mortality introduces an intrinsic time scale into the scale-invariant Brownian motion. This fact has important consequences for different statistics of Brownian motion. Here we are telling three short stories, where spontaneous death, such as radioactive decay, puts a natural limit to "lifetime achievements" of a Brownian particle. In story 1 we determine the probability distribution of a mortal Brownian particle (MBP) reaching a specified point in space at the time of its death. In story 2 we determine the probability distribution of the area A=0Tx(t)dtA=\int_0^{T} x(t) dt of a MBP on the line. Story 3 addresses the distribution of the winding angle of a MBP wandering around a reflecting disk in the plane. In stories 1 and 2 the probability distributions exhibit integrable singularities at zero values of the position and the area, respectively. In story 3 a singularity at zero winding angle appears only in the limit of very high mortality. A different integrable singularity appears at a nonzero winding angle. It is inherited from the recently uncovered singularity of the short-time large-deviation function of the winding angle for immortal Brownian motion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.03963,
  title  = {Mortal Brownian motion: three short stories},
  author = {Baruch Meerson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03963},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 one-column pages, 4 figures, small changes

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:03:25.792Z