title: Asymptotic properties of a bold random walk.
abstract: In a recent paper we proposed a non-Markovian random walk model with memory of the maximum distance ever reached from the starting point (home). The behavior of the walker is different from the simple symmetric random walk only when she is at this maximum distance, where, having the choice to move either farther or closer, she decides with different probabilities. If the probability of a forward step is higher than the probability of a backward step, the walker is bold and her behavior turns out to be superdiffusive; otherwise she is timorous and her behavior turns out to be subdiffusive. The scaling behavior varies continuously from subdiffusive (timorous) to superdiffusive (bold) according to a single parameter γ∈R. We investigate here the asymptotic properties of the bold case in the nonballistic region γ∈[0,1/2], a problem which was left partially unsolved previously. The exact results proved in this paper require new probabilistic tools which rely on the construction of appropriate martingales of the random walk and its hitting times.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienze dell'Informazione e Matematica, Università dell'Aquila, 67010 L'Aquila, Italy and Departamento de Biofísica e Farmacologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 59072-970 Natal-RN, Brazil.
authors.forename: Maurizio
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Serva
mesh_terms: D004058:Diffusion; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009038:Motion