Diffusion of active tracers in fluctuating fields

The problem of a particle diffusion in a fluctuating scalar field is studied. In contrast to most studies of advection diffusion in random fields, ours analyzes the case where the particle position is also coupled to the dynamics of the field. Physical realizations of this problem are numerous and range from the diffusion of proteins in fluctuating membranes to the diffusion of localized magnetic fields in spin systems. We present exact results for the diffusion constant of particles diffusing in dynamical Gaussian fields in the adiabatic limit, where the field evolution is much faster than the particle diffusion. In addition we compute the diffusion constant perturbatively, in the weak coupling limit, when the interaction of the particle with the field is small, using a Kubo-type relation. Finally we construct a simple toy model which can be solved exactly, and which extrapolates between the adiabatic limit, for fields with rapid dynamics, and the limit where the field is quenched or frozen.