English

Subdiffusive Transport in Heterogeneous Patchy Environments

Statistical Mechanics 2017-10-06 v1

Abstract

Transport across heterogeneous, patchy environments is a ubiquitous phenomenon spanning fields of study including ecological movement, intracellular transport and regions of specialised function in a cell. These regions or patches may be highly heterogeneous in their properties, and often exhibit anomalous behaviour (resulting from e.g. crowding or viscoelastic effects) which necessitates the inclusion of non-Markovian dynamics in their study. However, many such processes are also subject to an internal self-regulating or tempering process due to concurrent competing functions being carried out. In this work we develop a model for anomalous transport across a heterogeneous, patchy environment subject to tempering. We show that in the long-time an equilibrium may be reached with constant effective transport rates between the patches. This result is qualitatively different from untempered systems where subdiffusion results in the long-time accumulation of all particles in the patch with lowest anomalous exponent, 0<μ<10<\mu<1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.01982,
  title  = {Subdiffusive Transport in Heterogeneous Patchy Environments},
  author = {Sergei Fedotov and Helena Stage},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.01982},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:04:34.604Z