# The narrow escape problem in a circular domain with radial piecewise constant diffusivity

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how spatially varying diffusivity in a circular domain affects the mean first passage time for particles to escape through a small boundary region, revealing optimal configurations and discontinuous dependencies.

## Contribution

It introduces a model with piecewise constant diffusivity in a circular domain to analyze the narrow escape problem, highlighting the effects of inhomogeneous diffusion on MFPT.

## Key findings

- MFPT can be minimized by tuning the outer shell width in annulus geometry.
- In two-shell geometry, MFPT depends monotonically on model parameters.
- The optimal starting point distance depends discontinuously on diffusivity ratio.

## Abstract

The stochastic motion of particles in living cells is often spatially inhomogeneous with a higher effective diffusivity in a region close to the cell boundary due to active transport along actin filaments. As a first step to understand the consequence of the existence of two compartments with different diffusion constant for stochastic search problems we consider here a Brownian particle in a circular domain with different diffusion constants in the inner and the outer shell. We focus on the narrow escape problem and compute the mean first passage time (MFPT) for Brownian particles starting at some pre-defined position to find a small region on the outer reflecting boundary. For the annulus geometry we find that the MFPT can be minimized for a specific value of the width of the outer shell. In contrast for the two-shell geometry we show that the MFPT depends monotonously on all model parameters, in particular on the outer shell width. Moreover we find that the distance between the starting point and the narrow escape region which maximizes the MFPT depends discontinuously on the ratio between inner and outer diffusivity.