Stochastic Resetting: A (Very) Brief Review

Abstract

Stochastic processes offer a fundamentally different paradigm of dynamics than deterministic processes that one is most familiar with, the most prominent example of the latter being Newton’s laws of motion. Here, we discuss in a pedagogical manner a simple and illustrative example of stochastic processes in the form of a particle undergoing standard Brownian diffusion, with the additional feature of the particle resetting repeatedly and at random times to its initial condition. Over the years, many different variants of this simple setting have been studied, including extensions to many-body interacting systems, all of which serve as illustrations of peculiar non-trivial and interesting static and dynamic features that characterize stochastic dynamics at long times. We will provide in this work a brief overview of this active and rapidly evolving field by considering the arguably simplest example of Brownian diffusion in one dimension. Along the way, we will learn about some of the general techniques that a physicist employs to study stochastic processes. Relevant to the special issue, we will discuss in detail how introducing resetting in an otherwise diffusive dynamics provides an explicit optimization of the time to locate a misplaced target through a special choice of the resetting protocol. We also discuss thermodynamics of resetting, and provide a bird’s eye view of some of the recent work in the field of resetting.