Spatiotemporal Characterization of Active Brownian Dynamics in Channels

Accumulation at boundaries represents a widely observed phenomenon in active systems with implications for microbial ecology and engineering applications. To rationalize the underlying physics, we provide analytical predictions for the first-passage properties and spatial distributions of a confined active Brownian particle (ABP). We show that ABPs with absorbing and hard-wall boundary conditions are Siegmund duals, yielding a direct mapping between the propagators of the two problems. We analyze the system across low and high activity regimes – quantifying persistent motion relative to diffusion – and show that active motion, together with a favorable initial orientation, typically lowers the mean first-passage time relative to passive diffusion. Notably, the full time-dependent propagator between hard walls approaches a wall-accumulated stationary state given by the derivative of the splitting probability as a consequence of Siegmund duality.