Extremal statistics of a one dimensional run and tumble particle with an absorbing wall

Abstract

We study the extreme value statistics of a run and tumble particle (RTP) in one dimension till its first passage to the origin starting from the position $x_0~(>0)$. This model has recently drawn a lot of interest due to its biological application in modelling the motion of certain species of bacteria. Herein, we analytically study the exact time-dependent propagators for a single RTP in a finite interval with absorbing conditions at its two ends. By exploiting a path decomposition technique, we use these propagators appropriately to compute the joint distribution $\mathscr{P}(M,t_m)$ of the maximum displacement $M$ till first-passage and the time $t_m$ at which this maximum is achieved exactly. The corresponding marginal distributions $\mathbb{P}_M(M)$ and $P_M(t_m)$ are studied separately and verified numerically. In particular, we find that the marginal distribution $P_M(t_m)$ has interesting asymptotic forms for large and small $t_m$. While for small $t_m$, the distribution $P_M(t_m)$ depends sensitively on the initial velocity direction $\sigma _i$ and is completely different from the Brownian motion, the large $t_m$ decay of $P_M(t_m)$ is same as that of the Brownian motion although the amplitude crucially depends on the initial conditions $x_0$ and $\sigma _i$. We verify all our analytical results to high precision by numerical simulations.