Diffusers, potential slides, and surmountability

Iddo Eliazar*, Joseph Klafter

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

A diffuser traversing an infinitely steep 'potential slide' might never overcome it. In such cases, the notion of First Passage Time - 'how long would it take till the diffuser surmounts the slide?' - is inadequate. Rather, the notion of relevance is that of Peak Height - 'how high-up the potential slide would the diffuser reach?'. Placing the 'potential slide' on the non-negative half-line, the Global Minimum attained by the diffuser's trajectory becomes a universal measure for the Peak Height. In this manuscript, the Global Minima of general diffuser systems on the non-negative half-line which are 'pushed away' from the origin are explored. We (i) compute the statistical distributions of the Global Minima; (ii) establish a reverse-engineering scheme which tells us how to design diffuser systems to obtain a pre-desired Global Minimum distribution; (iii) study the probabilistic limit-laws of the Global Minimum distributions; and (iv) characterize the class of diffuser systems with scale-free Global Minimum distributions. Lastly, we investigate the Global Minimum attained by an entire 'flock' of independent diffusers, whose initial locations are randomly scattered along the positive half-line.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)373-393
Number of pages21
JournalPhysica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
Volume361
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Mar 2006

Keywords

  • Diffuser systems
  • Global minima
  • Limit-laws of global minimum distributions
  • Potential slides
  • Power laws
  • Reverse-engineering
  • Scale-free global minimum distributions
  • Surmountability

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Diffusers, potential slides, and surmountability'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this