Abstract
The paper addresses the single-file diffusion in the presence of an absorbing boundary. The emphasis is on an interplay between the hard-core interparticle interaction and the absorption process.
The resulting dynamics exhibits several qualitatively new features. First, starting with the exact probability density function for a given particle (a tracer), we study the long-time asymptotics of its moments.
Both the mean position and the mean-square displacement are controlled by dynamical exponents which depend on the initial order of the particle in the file. Second, conditioning on nonabsorption, we study the distribution of long-living particles.
In the conditioned framework, the dynamical exponents are the same for all particles, however, a given particle possesses an effective diffusion coefficient which depends on its initial order. After performing the thermodynamic limit, the conditioned dynamics of the tracer is subdiffusive, the generalized diffusion coefficient D-1/2 being different from that reported for the system without absorbing boundary.