Extreme first passage times

Speaker: Sean Lawley

Date: Tue, May 11, 2021

Location: UBC, Vancouver, Canada, Online

Conference: PIMS Workshop on New Trends in Localized Patterns in PDES

Subject: Mathematics

Class: Scientific

Abstract:

The first passage time (FPT) of a diffusive searcher to a target determines the timescale of many physical, chemical, and biological processes. While most studies focus on the FPT of a given single searcher, another important quantity in some scenarios is the FPT of the first searcher to find a target from a large group of searchers. This fastest FPT is called an extreme FPT and can be orders of magnitude faster than the FPT of a given single searcher. In this talk, we will explain recent results in extreme FPT theory and give special attention to the case of extreme FPTs to small targets. Time permitting, we will also explain results on extreme FPTs of subdiffusion modeled by a fractional time derivative and superdiffusion modeled by a fractional Laplacian.