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, that is, the times to reach a certain threshold of a trajectory quantity which takes values in the positive integers and is non-decreasing in time. For classical continuous-time Markov chains we rigorously prove: (i) a large deviation principle (LDP) for FPTs, whose corollary is a strong law of large numbers; (ii) a concentration inequality for the FPT of the dynamical activity, which provides an upper bound to the probability of its fluctuations to all orders; and (iii) an upper bound to the probability of the tails for the FPT of an arbitrary counting observable. For quantum Markov processes we rigorously prove: (iv) the quantum version of the LDP, and subsequent strong law of large numbers, for the FPTs of generic counts of quantum jumps; (v) a concentration bound for the the FPT of total number of quantum jumps, which provides an upper bound to the probability of its fluctuations to all orders, together with a similar bound for the sub-class of quantum reset processes which requires less strict irreducibility conditions; and (vi) a tail bound for the FPT of arbitrary counts. Our results allow to extend to FPTs the so-called "inverse thermodynamic uncertainty relations" that upper bound the size of fluctuations in time-integrated quantities. We illustrate our results with simple examples.
Bakewell-Smith et al. (Mon,) studied this question.