Scaled Brownian motion with random anomalous diffusion exponent

Abstract

The scaled Brownian motion (SBM) is regarded as one of the paradigmatic random processes, featuring the anomalous diffusion property characterized by the diffusion exponent. It is a Gaussian, self-similar process with independent increments, which has found applications across various fields, from turbulence and stochastic hydrology to biophysics. In our paper, inspired by recent single particle tracking biological experiments, we introduce a process termed the scaled Brownian motion with random exponent (SBMRE), which preserves SBM characteristics at the level of individual trajectories, albeit with randomly varying anomalous diffusion exponents across the trajectories. We discuss the main probabilistic properties of SBMRE, including its probability density function (pdf), and the q-th absolute moment. Additionally, we present the expected value of the time-averaged mean squared displacement (TAMSD) and the ergodicity breaking parameter. Furthermore, we analyze the pdf of the first hitting time in a semi-infinite domain, the martingale property of SBMRE, and its stochastic exponential. As special cases, we consider two distributions of the anomalous diffusion exponent, namely the two-point and beta distributions, and discuss the asymptotics of the presented characteristics in such cases. Theoretical results for SBMRE are validated through numerical simulations and compared with the corresponding characteristics for SBM.