Irreversible Reactions and Diffusive Escape: Stationary Properties

Abstract

We study three basic diffusion-controlled reaction processes -- annihilation, coalescence, and aggregation. We examine the evolution starting with the most natural inhomogeneous initial configuration where a half-line is uniformly filled by particles, while the complementary half-line is empty. We show that the total number of particles that infiltrate the initially empty half-line is finite and has a stationary distribution. We determine the evolution of the average density from which we derive the average total number N of particles in the initially empty half-line; e.g., for annihilation \langle N\rangle = 3/16+1/(4\pi). For the coalescence process, we devise a procedure that in principle allows one to compute P(N), the probability to find exactly N particles in the initially empty half-line; we complete the calculations in the first non-trivial case (N=1). As a by-product we derive the distance distribution between the two leading particles.