Conditioned backward and forward times of diffusion with stochastic resetting: a renewal theory approach

Abstract

Stochastic resetting can be naturally understood as a renewal process governing the evolution of an underlying stochastic process. In this work, we formally derive well-known results of diffusion with resets from a renewal theory perspective. Parallel to the concepts from renewal theory, we introduce the conditioned backward and forward times for stochastic processes with resetting to be the times since the last and until the next reset, given that the current state of the system is known. We focus on studying diffusion under Markovian and non-Markovian resetting. For these cases, we find the conditioned backward and forward time PDFs, comparing them with numerical simulations of the process. In particular, we find that for power-law reset time PDFs with asymptotic form $\varphi(t)\sim t^{-1-\alpha}$, significant changes in the properties of the conditioned backward and forward times happen at half-integer values of $\alpha$. This is due to the composition between the long-time scaling of diffusion $P(x,t)\sim 1/\sqrt{t}$ and the reset time PDF.