Territory covered by N random walkers on fractal media: the Sierpinski gasket and the percolation aggregate.

We address the problem of evaluating the number S(N)(t) of distinct sites visited up to time t by N noninteracting random walkers all starting from the same origin in fractal media. For a wide class of fractals (of which the percolation cluster at criticality and the Sierpinski gasket are typical examples) we propose, for large N and after the short-time compact regime, an asymptotic series for S(N)(t) analogous to that found for Euclidean media: S(N)(t) approximately S(N)(t)(1-Delta). Here S(N)(t) is the number of sites (volume) inside a hypersphere of radius L[ln(N)/c]1/v where L is the root-mean-square chemical displacement of a single random walker, and v and c determine how fast 1-Gamma(t)(l) (the probability that a given site at chemical distance l from the origin is visited by a single random walker by time t) decays for large values of l/L: 1-Gamma(t)(l) approximately exp[-c(l/L)(v)]. For the fractals considered in this paper, v=d(l)w/((d(l)w)-1), d(l)w being the chemical-diffusion exponent. The corrective term Delta is expressed as a series in ln(-n)(N)ln(m) ln(N) (with n> or =1 and 0< or =m< or =n), which is given explicitly up to n=2. This corrective term contributes substantially to the final value of S(N)(t) even for relatively large values of N.