Channel Formation Enhances Target Consumption by Chemotactic Active Brownian Particles

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that environmental encoding of target location by chemotactic active Brownian particles improves search efficiency, increases encounter rates, and enhances target utilization without requiring memory or communication.

Contribution

It introduces a model showing environmental encoding outperforms memoryless strategies in boosting encounter rates and target utilization in chemotactic search.

Findings

Environmental encoding increases hit rate

Reduces impact of target size

Enhances total target utilization

Abstract

In many situations, simply finding a target during a search is not enough. It is equally important to be able to return to that target repeatedly or to enable a larger community to locate and utilize it. While first passage time is commonly used to measure search success, relatively little is known about increasing the average rate of target encounters over time. Here, using an active Brownian particle model with chemotaxis, we demonstrate that when a searcher has no memory and there is no communication among multiple searchers, encoding information about the target's location in the environment outperforms purely memoryless strategies by boosting the overall hit rate. We further show that this approach reduces the impact of target size on a successful search and increases the total utilization time of the target.