On a family of coupled diffusions that can never change their initial order

Abstract

Abstract We introduce a real-valued family of interacting diffusions where their paths can meet but cannot cross each other in a way that would alter their initial order. Any given interacting pair is a solution to coupled stochastic differential equations with time-dependent coefficients satisfying certain regularity conditions with respect to each other. These coefficients explicitly determine whether these processes bounce away from each other or stick to one another if/when their paths collide. When all interacting diffusions in the system follow a martingale behaviour, and if all these paths ultimately come into collision, we show that the system reaches a random steady-state with zero fluctuation thereafter. We prove that in a special case when certain paths abide to a deterministic trend, the system reduces down to the topology of captive diffusions. We also show that square-root diffusions form a subclass of the proposed family of processes. Applications include order-driven interacting particle systems in physics, adhesive microbial dynamics in biology and risk-bounded quadratic optimization solutions in control theory.