Universal framework for the long-time position distribution of free active particles
Abstract
Active particles self-propel themselves with a stochastically evolving velocity, generating a persistent motion leading to a non-diffusive behavior of the position distribution. Nevertheless, an effective diffusive behavior emerges at times much larger than the persistence time. Here we develop a general framework for studying the long-time behavior for a class of active particle dynamics and illustrate it using the examples of run-and-tumble particle, active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particle, active Brownian particle, and direction reversing active Brownian particle. Treating the ratio of the persistence-time to the observation time as the small parameter, we show that the position distribution generically satisfies the diffusion equation at the leading order. We further show that the sub-leading contributions, at each order, satisfies an inhomogeneous diffusion equation, where the source term depends on the previous order solutions. We explicitly obtain a few sub-leading contributions to the Gaussian position distribution. As a part of our framework, we also prescribe a way to find the position moments recursively and compute the first few explicitly for each model.
- Publication:
-
Journal of Physics A Mathematical General
- Pub Date:
- September 2022
- DOI:
- 10.1088/1751-8121/ac864c
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2202.12117
- Bibcode:
- 2022JPhA...55L5002S
- Keywords:
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- nonequilibrium statistical physics;
- active particles;
- run and tumble particles;
- active Ornstein Uhlenbeck particles;
- active Brownian particles;
- direction reversing active Brownian particles;
- Fokker-Planck equations;
- Condensed Matter - Statistical Mechanics;
- Condensed Matter - Soft Condensed Matter
- E-Print:
- 50 pages, 6 figures