Editor's Summary
1 November 2007
Mean first-passage times
How long does it take a random walker to reach a given target point? This quantity, called first-passage time (FPT), is important because of its role in real situations such as transport in disordered media, neuron firing, spread of diseases and target search processes. Previous methods of determining FPT properties were effectively limited to one-dimensional geometries or to homogeneous media. Condamin et al. have developed a general theory that allows the accurate evaluation of the mean FPT in complex media. The predictions are confirmed by numerical simulations of several models of disordered media, fractals, anomalous diffusion and scale-free networks, including a yeast protein interaction network.
News and Views: Mathematical physics: First encounters
The idea of 'random walks' pops up in areas from biochemical reaction pathways to animals' foraging strategies. A central question — how likely is it that a walker is somewhere for the first time? — now has a simpler answer.
Michael F. Shlesinger
doi:10.1038/450040a
Letter: First-passage times in complex scale-invariant media
S. Condamin, O. Bénichou, V. Tejedor, R. Voituriez & J. Klafter
doi:10.1038/nature06201
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (608K) | Supplementary information
