"First-passage statistics and search strategies"
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How long does it take a "searcher" to reach a "target" for the first time? This
first-passage time is a key quantity for evaluating the kinetics of various
processes, and in particular chemical reactions involving "small" numbers of
particles such as gene transcription, or at larger scales the time needed for
animals to find food resources.
 I will present recent results which enable the evaluation of the distribution
of first-passage time  for a wide range of  random search processes evolving in
a confined domain. This approach reveals a general dependence of the
first-passage time distribution on the geometry of the problem, which can become
a key parameter that controls the kinetics of the search process. I will  show
how these results apply to transport in disordered and fractal media, and
highlight their implications in transcription kinetics and other search
processes at larger scales.