First passage time and entropy of a 1D Brownian particle with stochastic resetting to random positions

Synopsis

We explore the effects of stochastic resetting to random positions of a Brownian particle on first passage times and Shannon's entropy. We explore the different entropy regimes, namely, the externally-driven, the zero-entropy and the Maxwell demon regimes. We provide a novel analytical method to compute the mean first passage time (MPFT), the mean first passage number of resets (MFPNR) and mean first passage entropy (MFPE) in the case where the Brownian particle resets to random positions sampled from a set of distributions known a priori. We show the interplay between the reset position distribution's second moment and the reset rate, and the effect it has on the MFPT and MFPE. We further propose a mechanism whereby the entropy per reset can be either in the Maxwell demon or the externally driven regime, yet the overall mean first passage entropy corresponds to the zero-entropy regime. Additionally, we find an overlap between the dynamic phase space and the entropy phase space. Via Landauer's Principle, our results suggest that it is possible to have a search process in a finite time via stochastic resetting yet the minimum average work required to relocate the particle is zero. We use this method in a generalized version of the Evans-Majumdar model by assuming the reset position is random and sampled from a Gaussian distribution. We then consider the toggling reset whereby the Brownian particle resets to a random position sampled from a distribution dependent on the reset parity. All our results are compared to and in agreement with numerical simulations.