Effects of confinement in a Brownian gas with simultaneous stochastic resetting and dynamically emergent correlations

Abstract

We study $N$ non-interacting Brownian particles in an external potential under simultaneous stochastic resetting to the origin. Although they do not interact directly, common resets generate strong dynamically emergent correlations (DEC). We analyze how confinement modifies these correlations and the nonequilibrium stationary state for $V(x)=κ|x|^α$, $α\geq0$, focusing mainly on two analytically tractable cases: harmonic confinement (HC), $α=2$, and box confinement (BC), $α\to\infty$. In both cases the stationary state is controlled by the competition between confinement and resetting lengths. We derive exact results for the stationary joint distribution, density, correlations, extreme value statistics (EVS), and gap statistics. While the density behaves similarly in HC and BC, the normalized correlation coefficient differs sharply. In BC it is non-monotonic and overshoots the unconfined value, as hard walls suppress decorrelating trajectories. In HC it instead increases monotonically toward the unconfined limit. For general $α$, the behavior is monotonic for $0<α<α_c=1+\sqrt{5}$ and non-monotonic for $α>α_c$. The difference between HC and BC is also visible in edge observables. In HC, the maximum scales as $M_1=O(\sqrt{\ln N})$ and has a limiting distribution with bounded support and a shape transition controlled by the ratio of the two length scales. In BC, the maximum is at distance $O(1/N)$ from the boundary, as in equilibrium, but its fluctuations have a broad power-law tail with logarithmic corrections. The first gap shows a similar contrast: BC gives a smaller typical gap but stronger anomalous fluctuations than HC. Finally, we extend the EVS analysis to general $α$ and identify, via simulations and scaling arguments, three universality classes: $0\leqα\leq1$, $1<α<\infty$, and the singular limit $α\to\infty$.