Controls that expedite first-passage times in disordered systems

Marc Höll, Alon Nissan, Brian Berkowitz, Eli Barkai

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4 Scopus citations

Abstract

First-passage time statistics in disordered systems exhibiting scale invariance are studied widely. In particular, long trapping times in energy or entropic traps are fat-tailed distributed, which slow the overall transport process. We study the statistical properties of the first-passage time of biased processes in different models, and we employ the big-jump principle that shows the dominance of the maximum trapping time on the first-passage time. We demonstrate that the removal of this maximum significantly expedites transport. As the disorder increases, the system enters a phase where the removal shows a dramatic effect. Our results show how we may speed up transport in strongly disordered systems exploiting scale invariance. In contrast to the disordered systems studied here, the removal principle has essentially no effect in homogeneous systems; this indicates that improving the conductance of a poorly conducting system is, theoretically, relatively easy as compared to a homogeneous system.

Original languageEnglish
Article number034124
JournalPhysical Review E
Volume108
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 American Physical Society.

Funding

M.H. is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Grant No. 436344834. The support of Israel Science Foundation Grant No. 1614/21 (E.B.) and ViTamins project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation grant AZ 9B192 (B.B.) is acknowledged. A.N. is supported by an ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship. B.B. holds the Sam Zuckerberg Professorial Chair in Hydrology.

FundersFunder number
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft436344834
Volkswagen FoundationAZ 9B192
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
Israel Science Foundation1614/21

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