Anomalous diffusion and run-and-tumble motion of a chemotactic particle in low dimensions

Abstract

We study the stochastic dynamics of a symmetric self-chemotactic particle and determine the long-time behavior of its mean squared displacement (MSD). The attractive or repulsive interaction of the particle with the chemical field that it generates induces a non-linear, non-Markovian effective dynamics, which results into anomalous diffusion for spatial dimensions $d \leq 2$. In one spatial dimension, we map the case of repulsive chemotaxis onto a run-and-tumble-like dynamics, leading to an MSD which, as a function of the elapsed time $t$, grows superdiffusively with exponent $4/3$. In the presence of attractive chemotaxis, instead, the particle exhibits a slowdown, with the MSD growing logarithmically with time. In $d=2$, we find logarithmic aging of the diffusion coefficient, while in $d=3$ the motion reverts standard diffusive behavior with a renormalized diffusion coefficient.