Resetting in a viscoelastic bath: the bath remembers

Abstract: We study stochastic resetting of a probe particle in a viscoelastic environment where only the probe is reset while the medium retains memory of its past dynamics. Using a minimal model with finite correlation time, we analyze the competition between the resetting timescale and the viscoelastic relaxation timescale. This interplay leads to nonequilibrium steady states that differ qualitatively from those of Markovian Brownian motion with resetting. In particular, strong memory effects produce stationary position distributions with non-exponential tails. For instantaneous resets, we derive the limiting steady-state distributions analytically and compute exactly the time dependent leading non-vanishing moments. We also investigate non-instantaneous resetting via constant-velocity return protocols. In contrast to overdamped Brownian motion, where steady-state fluctuations are independent of the return dynamics, we find that in a viscoelastic medium the fluctuations depend on the reset velocity. This protocol dependence arises from the finite memory of the environment and highlights the role of environmental correlations in resetting-induced steady states.