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First-passage statistics and search strategies
How long does it take a "searcher" to reach a "target" for the first time ? This first-passage time is a key quantity for evaluating the kinetics of various processes, and in particular chemical reactions involving "small" numbers of particles such as gene transcription, or at larger scales the time needed for animals to find food resources.
I will present recent results which enable the evaluation of the distribution of first-passage time for a wide range of random search processes evolving in a confined domain. This approach reveals a general dependence of the first-passage time distribution on the geometry of the problem, which can become a key parameter that controls the kinetics of the search process. I will show how these results apply to transport in disordered and fractal media, and highlight their implications in transcription kinetics and other search processes at larger scales.