Local time of Lévy random walks: A path integral approach.

Abstract

The local time of a stochastic process quantifies the amount of time that sample trajectories x(τ) spend in the vicinity of an arbitrary point x. For a generic Hamiltonian, we employ the phase-space path-integral representation of random walk transition probabilities in order to quantify the properties of the local time. For time-independent systems, the resolvent of the Hamiltonian operator proves to be a central tool for this purpose. In particular, we focus on the local times of Lévy random walks (Lévy flights), which correspond to fractional diffusion equations.