Persistence Exponents and the Statistics of Crossings and Occupation Times for Gaussian Stationary Processes

We consider the persistence probability, the occupation-time distribution and the distribution of the number of zero crossings for discrete or (equivalently) discretely sampled Gaussian Stationary Processes (GSPs) of zero mean. We first consider the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, finding expressions for the mean and variance of the number of crossings and the `partial survival' probability. We then elaborate on the correlator expansion developed in an earlier paper [G. C. M. A. Ehrhardt and A. J. Bray, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 070602 (2001)] to calculate discretely sampled persistence exponents of GSPs of known correlator by means of a series expansion in the correlator. We apply this method to the processes d^n x/dt^n=\eta(t) with n > 2, incorporating an extrapolation of the series to the limit of continuous sampling. We extend the correlator method to calculate the occupation-time and crossing-number distributions, as well as their partial-survival distributions and the means and variances of the occupation time and number of crossings. We apply these general methods to the d^n x/dt^n=\eta(t) processes for n=1 (random walk), n=2 (random acceleration) and larger n, and to diffusion from random initial conditions in 1-3 dimensions. The results for discrete sampling are extrapolated to the continuum limit where possible.