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

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 behavior 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.