Theory of relaxation dynamics for anomalous diffusion processes in harmonic potential

Abstract

Optical tweezers setup is often used to probe the motion of individual tracer particle, which promotes the study of relaxation dynamics of a generic process confined in a harmonic potential. We uncover the dependence of ensemble- and time-averaged mean square displacements of confined processes on the velocity correlation function $C(t,t+\tau )$ of the original process. With two different scaling forms of $C(t,t+\tau )$ for small $\tau$ and large $\tau$, the stationary value and the relaxation behaviors can be obtained immediately. The gotten results are valid for a large amount of anomalous diffusion processes, including fractional Brownian motion, scaled Brownian motion, and the multi-scale Lévy walk with different exponents of running time distribution.

5 pages, 3 figures