Diffusion-driven autocatalytic dynamics on a sphere

Abstract

We study the collective dynamics of independent particles that diffuse outside a spherical surface, on which they are replicated with a prescribed catalytic rate. In spatial dimensions three and higher, the transient nature of diffusion creates the competition between autocatalytic and escape events, thus leading to a rich phase diagram between subcritical (extinction), critical (steady-state), and supercritical (growth) regimes at long times. The rotational symmetry of the domain and an explicit form of the single-particle diffusion propagator allow us to obtain the statistics of the population size (i.e., the number of particles). In this way, we analyze the mean population size, its variance and higher-order moments, as well as the full distribution. In particular, we obtain a fully explicit form of the distribution at long times and describe a slow, power-law approach to this steady-state limit.