Evanescent continuous time random walks

Abstract

We study how an evanescence process affects the number of distinct sites visited by a continuous time random walker in one dimension. We distinguish two very different cases, namely, when evanescence can only occur concurrently with a jump, and when evanescence can occur at any time. The first is characteristic of trapping processes on a lattice, whereas the second is associated with spontaneous death processes such as radioactive decay. In both of these situations we consider three different forms of the waiting time distribution between jumps, namely, exponential, long-tailed, and ultra-slow.