Non-equilibrium steady states of stochastic processes with intermittent resetting

Abstract

Stochastic processes that are randomly reset to an initial condition serve as a showcase to investigate non-equilibrium steady states. However, all existing results have been restricted to the special case of memoryless resetting protocols. Here, we obtain the general solution for the distribution of processes in which waiting times between reset events are drawn from an arbitrary distribution. This allows for the investigation of a broader class of much more realistic processes. As an example, our results are applied to the analysis of the efficiency of constrained random search processes.

Keywords

• stochastic processes
• non-equilibrium steady states
• optimal search
• 05.40.Fb
• 05.10.Gg
• 52.65.Ff