Universal first-passage statistics of aging processes

Abstract: Many out of equilibrium phenomena, such as diffusion-limited reactions or target search processes, are controlled by first-passage events. So far the general determination of the mean first-passage time (FPT) to a target in confinement has left aside aging processes, involved in contexts as varied as glassy dynamics, tracer diffusion in biological membranes or transport of cold atoms in optical lattices. Here we consider general non-Markovian scale-invariant processes in arbitrary dimension, displaying aging, and demonstrate that all the moments of the FPT obey universal scalings with the confining volume with non trivial exponents. Our analysis shows that a nonlinear scaling of the mean FPT with the volume is the hallmark of aging and provides a general tool to quantify its impact on first-passage kinetics in confinement.