English

Diffusion of Asymmetric Swimmers

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-11-10 v1 Statistical Mechanics Cell Behavior

Abstract

Particles moving along curved trajectories will diffuse if the curvature fluctuates sufficiently in either magnitude or orientation. We consider particles moving at a constant speed with either a fixed or with a Gaussian distributed curvature magnitude. At small speeds the diffusivity is independent of the speed. At larger particle speeds, the diffusivity depends on the speed through a novel exponent. We apply our results to intracellular transport of vesicles. In sharp contrast to thermal diffusion, the effective diffusivity increases with vesicle size and so may provide an effective means of intracellular transport.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0302387,
  title  = {Diffusion of Asymmetric Swimmers},
  author = {Andrew D. Rutenberg and Andrew J. Richardson and Claire J. Montgomery},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0302387},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures (first figure takes awhile to print)

R2 v1 2026-07-22T10:46:58.575Z