Orientational Memory of Active Particles in Multistate Non-Markovian Processes

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing the decay of orientational correlations in active particles with multistate, non-Markovian dynamics, revealing how history-dependent switching influences relaxation behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a model that captures non-exponential sojourn times and their impact on orientation autocorrelation decay in active stochastic processes.

Findings

Analytical expressions for orientation autocorrelation in Markovian cases.

Identification of how non-exponential sojourn times affect correlation decay.

Demonstration that history-dependent switching alters relaxation dynamics.

Abstract

The orientational memory of particles can serve as an effective measure of diffusivity, spreading, and search efficiency in complex stochastic processes. We develop a theoretical framework to describe the decay of directional correlations in a generic class of stochastic active processes consisting of distinct states of motion characterized by their persistence and switching probabilities between the states. For exponentially distributed sojourn times, the orientation autocorrelation is analytically derived and the characteristic times of its crossovers are obtained in terms of the persistence of each state and the switching probabilities. We show how non-exponential sojourn-time distributions of interest, such as Gaussian and power-law distributions, can result from history-dependent transitions between the states. The relaxation behavior of the correlation function in such non-Markovian processes is governed by the history-dependence of the switching probabilities and cannot be solely determined by the mean sojourn times of the states.