No Arabic abstract
Levy walks (LWs) are spatiotemporally coupled random-walk processes describing superdiffusive heat conduction in solids, propagation of light in disordered optical materials, motion of molecular motors in living cells, or motion of animals, humans, robots, and viruses. We here investigate a key feature of LWs, their response to an external harmonic potential. In this generic setting for confined motion we demonstrate that LWs equilibrate exponentially and may assume a bimodal stationary distribution. We also show that the stationary distribution has a horizontal slope next to a reflecting boundary placed at the origin, in contrast to correlated superdiffusive processes. Our results generalize LWs to confining forces and settle some long-standing puzzles around LWs.
Levy walks define a fundamental concept in random walk theory which allows one to model diffusive spreading that is faster than Brownian motion. They have many applications across different disciplines. However, so far the derivation of a diffusion equation for an n-dimensional correlated Levy walk remained elusive. Starting from a fractional Klein-Kramers equation here we use a moment method combined with a Cattaneo approximation to derive a fractional diffusion equation for superdiffusive short range auto-correlated Levy walks in the large time limit, and solve it. Our derivation discloses different dynamical mechanisms leading to correlated Levy walk diffusion in terms of quantities that can be measured experimentally.
We investigate the first-passage dynamics of symmetric and asymmetric Levy flights in a semi-infinite and bounded intervals. By solving the space-fractional diffusion equation, we analyse the fractional-order moments of the first-passage time probability density function for different values of the index of stability and the skewness parameter. A comparison with results using the Langevin approach to Levy flights is presented. For the semi-infinite domain, in certain special cases analytic results are derived explicitly, and in bounded intervals a general analytical expression for the mean first-passage time of Levy flights with arbitrary skewness is presented. These results are complemented with extensive numerical analyses.
We demonstrate the phenomenon of cumulative inertia in intracellular transport involving multiple motor proteins in human epithelial cells by measuring the empirical survival probability of cargoes on the microtubule and their detachment rates. We found the longer a cargo moves along a microtubule, the less likely it detaches from it. As a result, the movement of cargoes is non-Markovian and involves a memory. We observe memory effects on the scale of up to 2 seconds. We provide a theoretical link between the measured detachment rate and the super-diffusive Levy walk-like cargo movement.
Integral transform method (Fourier or Laplace transform, etc) is more often effective to do the theoretical analysis for the stochastic processes. However, for the time-space coupled cases, e.g., Levy walk or nonlinear cases, integral transform method may fail to be so strong or even do not work again. Here we provide Hermite polynomial expansion approach, being complementary to integral transform method. Some statistical observables of general Levy walks are calculated by the Hermite polynomial expansion approach, and the comparisons are made when both the integral transform method and the newly introduced approach work well.
Levy walk is a fundamental model with applications ranging from quantum physics to paths of animal foraging. Taking animal foraging as an example, a natural idea that comes to ones mind is to introduce the multiple internal states for dealing with the dependence of the PDF of waiting time on the energy of the animal and richness of the food at a particular location, etc; the framework can also be used to model the moving trajectories of smart animals without returning to the directions or locations which they come from immediately. After building the Levy walk model with multiple internal states and deriving the governing equation of the distribution of the positions of the particles, some applications are discussed with specific transition matrices. The type of diffusion for non-immediately-repeating L{e}vy walk is uncovered, and the distribution and average of first passage time are numerically simulated.