2025/05/30 by Yonathan Sarmiento, Sarmiento, Yonathan, Benjamin Walter +9 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern Formation #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.24483
openalex publication_date 2025/05/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
We explore first-passage phenomenology for biased active processes with a renewal-type structure, focusing in particular on paradigmatic run-and-tumble models in both discrete and continuous state spaces. In general, we show there is no equality between distributions of conditional first-passage times to symmetric barriers positioned in and against the bias direction. However, we give conditions for such a duality to be restored asymptotically (in the limit of a large barrier distance) and highlight connections to the Gallavotti-Cohen fluctuation relation and the method of images. Our general trajectory arguments of first-passage-time distributions for asymmetric run-and-tumble processes to escape from an interval of arbitrary width are supported by exact analytical results, which we derive extending Montroll's defect technique. Furthermore, we quantify the degree of violation of first-passage duality using Kullback-Leibler divergence and signal-to-noise ratios associated with the first-passage times to the two barriers. We reveal an intriguing dependence of such measures of first-passage asymmetry on the underlying often hidden tumbling dynamics which may inspire inference techniques based on first-passage-time statistics in active systems.