Universal framework for the long-time position distribution of free active particles

TL;DR

This paper develops a universal theoretical framework to analyze the long-time position distribution of various active particles, revealing their emergent diffusive behavior and providing explicit sub-leading corrections.

Contribution

It introduces a general diffusion-based approach for long-time behavior of active particles, applicable to multiple models, with recursive methods for moments and explicit sub-leading terms.

Findings

Position distribution satisfies diffusion equation at leading order.

Sub-leading corrections follow inhomogeneous diffusion equations.

Explicit expressions for position moments and Gaussian distribution corrections.

Abstract

Active particles self-propel themselves with a stochastically evolving velocity, generating a persistent motion leading to a non-diffusive behavior of the position distribution. Nevertheless, an effective diffusive behavior emerges at times much larger than the persistence time. Here we develop a general framework for studying the long-time behaviour for a class of active particle dynamics and illustrate it using the examples of run-and-tumble particle, active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particle, active Brownian particle, and direction reversing active Brownian particle. Treating the ratio of the persistence-time to the observation time as the small parameter, we show that the position distribution generically satisfies the diffusion equation at the leading order. We further show that the sub-leading contributions, at each order, satisfies an inhomogeneous diffusion equation, where the source term depends on the previous order solutions. We explicitly obtain a few sub-leading contributions to the Gaussian position distribution. As a part of our framework, we also prescribe a way to find the position moments recursively and compute the first few explicitly for each model.