Perturbative path-integral study of active- and passive-tracer diffusion in fluctuating fields

Abstract

We study the effective diffusion constant of a Brownian particle linearly coupled to a thermally fluctuating scalar field. We use a path-integral method to compute the effective diffusion coefficient perturbatively to lowest order in the coupling constant. This method can be applied to cases where the field is affected by the particle (an active tracer) and cases where the tracer is passive. Our results are applicable to a wide range of physical problems, from a protein diffusing in a membrane to the dispersion of a passive tracer in a random potential. In the case of passive diffusion in a scalar field, we show that the coupling to the field can, in some cases, speed up the diffusion corresponding to a form of stochastic resonance. Our results on passive diffusion are also confirmed via a perturbative calculation of the probability density function of the particle in a Fokker-Planck formulation of the problem. Numerical simulations on simplified systems corroborate our results.