Elucidating the Role of Subdiffusion and Evanescence in the Target Problem: Some Recent Results

¹ Departamento de Física Aplicada, Centro Universitario de Mérida, Universidad de Extremadura, E-06800 Mérida, Spain
² Departamento de Física, Universidad de Extremadura, E-06071 Badajoz, Spain
³ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and BioCircuits Institute, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0340, USA

^⋆ Corresponding author. E-mail: eabad@unex.es

Abstract

We present an overview of recent results for the classic problem of the survival probability of an immobile target in the presence of a single mobile trap or of a collection of uncorrelated mobile traps. The diffusion exponent of the traps is taken to be either γ = 1, associated with normal diffusive motion, or 0 < γ < 1, corresponding to subdiffusive motion. We consider traps that can only die upon interaction with the target and, alternatively, traps that may die due to an additional evanescence process even before hitting the target. The evanescence reaction is found to completely modify the survival probability of the target. Such evanescence processes are important in systems where the addition of scavenger molecules may result in the removal of the majority species, or ones where the mobile traps have a finite intrinsic lifetime.