Dynamical metastability and re-entrant localization of trapped active elements with speed and orientation fluctuations

We explore the dynamics of active elements performing persistent random motion with fluctuating active speed and in the presence of translational noise in a <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><a:mi>d</a:mi></a:math>-dimensional harmonic trap, modeling active speed generation through an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. Our approach employs an exact analytic method based on the Fokker-Planck equation to compute time-dependent moments of any dynamical variable of interest across arbitrary dimensions. We analyze dynamical crossovers in particle displacement before reaching the steady state, focusing on three key timescales: speed relaxation, persistence, and dynamical relaxation in the trap. Notably, for slow active speed relaxation, we observe an intermediate-time metastable saturation in the mean-squared displacement before reaching the final steady state. The steady-state distributions of particle positions exhibit two types of non-Gaussian departures based on control parameters: bimodal distributions with negative excess kurtosis and heavy-tailed unimodal distributions with positive excess kurtosis. We obtain detailed steady-state phase diagrams using the exact calculation of excess kurtosis, identifying Gaussian and non-Gaussian regions and potential re-entrant transitions.