Searching for clusters of targets under stochastic resetting

Abstract

We consider diffusion under stochastic resetting to the origin in one dimension and compute the mean time to find both of two targets placed either side of the origin. A surprising result is that increasing the distance between two targets can decrease the overall search time. We compute the optimal arrangement of two targets in limiting cases. We generalise to obtain recursive expressions for the mean time to find all of multiple targets. We discuss the relevance to real-world problems of locating multiple targets such as proteins locating clusters of DNA lesions.