Effective rates in dilute reaction-advection systems for the annihilation process $A + A \to \varnothing$

Abstract: A dilute system of reacting particles transported by fluid flows is considered. The particles react as $A + A \to \varnothing$ with a given rate when they are within a finite radius of interaction. The system is described in terms of the joint n-point number spatial density that it is shown to obey a hierarchy of transport equations. An analytic solution is obtained in either the dilute or the long-time limit by using a Lagrangian approach where statistical averages are performed along non- reacting trajectories. In this limit, it is shown that the moments of the number of particles have an exponential decay rather than the algebraic prediction of standard mean-field approaches. The effective reaction rate is then related to Lagrangian pair statistics by a large-deviation principle. A phenomenological model is introduced to study the qualitative behavior of the effective rate as a function of the interaction length, the degree of chaoticity of the dynamics and the compressibility of the carrier flow. Exact computations, obtained via a Feynman-Kac approach, in a smooth, compressible, random delta-correlated-in-time Gaussian velocity field support the proposed heuristic approach.