Brownian motion: a paradigm of soft matter and biological physics
نویسندگان
چکیده
This is a pedagogical introduction to Brownian motion on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s 1905 paper on the subject. After briefly reviewing Einstein’s work in its contemporary context, we pursue some lines of further developments and applications in soft condensed matter and biology. Over the last century Brownian motion became promoted from an odd curiosity of marginal scientific interest to a guiding theme pervading all of the modern (live) sciences.
منابع مشابه
Brownian molecular motors driven by rotation-translation coupling.
We investigated three models of Brownian motors which convert rotational diffusion into directed translational motion by switching on and off a potential. In the first model a spatially asymmetric potential generates directed translational motion by rectifying rotational diffusion. It behaves much like a conventional flashing ratchet. The second model utilizes both rotational diffusion and drif...
متن کاملSwarms with canonical active Brownian motion.
We present a swarm model of Brownian particles with harmonic interactions, where the individuals undergo canonical active Brownian motion, i.e., each Brownian particle can convert internal energy to mechanical energy of motion. We assume the existence of a single global internal energy of the system. Numerical simulations show amorphous swarming behavior as well as static configurations. Analyt...
متن کاملBrownian motion of tethered nanowires.
Brownian motion of slender particles near a boundary is ubiquitous in biological systems and in nanomaterial assembly, but the complex hydrodynamic interaction in those systems is still poorly understood. Here, we report experimental and computational studies of the Brownian motion of silicon nanowires tethered on a substrate. An optical interference method enabled direct observation of microsc...
متن کاملCanonical active Brownian motion.
Active Brownian motion is the complex motion of active Brownian particles. They are "active" in the sense that they can transform their internal energy into energy of motion and thus create complex motion patterns. Theories of active Brownian motion so far imposed couplings between the internal energy and the kinetic energy of the system. We investigate how this idea can be naturally taken furt...
متن کاملSuperdiffusive trajectories in Brownian motion.
The Brownian motion of a microscopic particle in a fluid is one of the cornerstones of statistical physics and the paradigm of a random process. One of the most powerful tools to quantify it was provided by Langevin, who explicitly accounted for a short-time correlated "thermal" force. The Langevin picture predicts ballistic motion, ~t(2) at short-time scales, and diffusive motion ~...
متن کامل