Long time behaviour in a model of microtubule growth

Abstract

We study a continuous time stochastic process on strings made of two types of particles, whose dynamics mimics the behaviour of microtubules in a living cell; namely, the strings evolve via a competition between (local) growth/shrinking as well as (global) hydrolysis processes. We give a complete characterization of the phase diagram of the model, and derive several criteria of the transient and recurrent regimes for the underlying stochastic process.