Paper detail

Diffusion with stochastic resetting at power-law times

What happens when a continuously evolving stochastic process is interrupted with large changes at random intervals $τ$ distributed as a power-law $\sim τ^{-(1+α)};α>0$? Modeling the stochastic process by diffusion and the large changes as abrupt resets to the initial condition, we obtain {\em exact} closed-form expressions for both static and dynamic quantities, while accounting for strong correlations implied by a power-law. Our results show that the resulting dynamics exhibits a spectrum of rich long-time behavior, from an ever-spreading spatial distribution for $α< 1$, to one that is time independent for $α> 1$. The dynamics has strong consequences on the time to reach a distant target for the first time; we specifically show that there exists an optimal $α$ that minimizes the mean time to reach the target, thereby offering a step towards a viable strategy to locate targets in a crowded environment.