Asymptotic properties of a bold random walk

Maurizio Serva
Phys. Rev. E 90, 022121 – Published 19 August 2014

Abstract

In a recent paper we proposed a non-Markovian random walk model with memory of the maximum distance ever reached from the starting point (home). The behavior of the walker is different from the simple symmetric random walk only when she is at this maximum distance, where, having the choice to move either farther or closer, she decides with different probabilities. If the probability of a forward step is higher than the probability of a backward step, the walker is bold and her behavior turns out to be superdiffusive; otherwise she is timorous and her behavior turns out to be subdiffusive. The scaling behavior varies continuously from subdiffusive (timorous) to superdiffusive (bold) according to a single parameter γR. We investigate here the asymptotic properties of the bold case in the nonballistic region γ[0,1/2], a problem which was left partially unsolved previously. The exact results proved in this paper require new probabilistic tools which rely on the construction of appropriate martingales of the random walk and its hitting times.

  • Received 13 June 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.90.022121

©2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Maurizio Serva

  • Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienze dell'Informazione e Matematica, Università dell'Aquila, 67010 L'Aquila, Italy and Departamento de Biofísica e Farmacologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 59072-970 Natal-RN, Brazil

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Issue

Vol. 90, Iss. 2 — August 2014

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