Anomalous statistics of random relaxations in random environments

Abstract

We comprehensively analyze the emergence of anomalous statistics in the context of the random relaxation (RARE) model [Eliazar and Metzler, J. Chem. Phys. 137, 234106 (2012)], a recently introduced versatile model of random relaxations in random environments. The RARE model considers excitations scattered randomly across a metric space around a reaction center. The excitations react randomly with the center, the reaction rates depending on the excitations' distances from this center. Relaxation occurs upon the first reaction between an excitation and the center. Addressing both the relaxation time and the relaxation range, we explore when these random variables display anomalous statistics, namely, heavy tails at zero and at infinity that manifest, respectively, exceptionally high occurrence probabilities of very small and very large outliers. A cohesive set of closed-form analytic results is established, determining precisely when such anomalous statistics emerge.