Run-and-tumble particles in a harmonic external field: Constructing the solution of the Fokker–Planck equation from the equations of motion

A method for integrating the Langevin equations of motion for run-and-tumble particles is introduced to compute the joint distribution of their position and active velocity, with and without a harmonic external force field. The key step is the construction of the moments of the distribution and the correlation functions, conditional on the particles being in a specific state at the final time. For one-dimensional run-and-tumble particles in a harmonic external potential, the exact steady-state distributions for the tumble state, as well as for the run state conditional on a specified velocity direction, are obtained. This enables us to demonstrate their equivalence to the exact solutions of the corresponding Fokker–Planck equations.