Mass changes the diffusion coefficient of particles with ligand-receptor contacts in the overdamped limit
Soft Condensed Matter
2022-10-05 v2
Abstract
Inertia does not generally affect the long-time diffusion of passive overdamped particles in fluids. Yet a model starting from the Langevin equation predicts a surprising property of particles coated with ligands, that bind reversibly to surface receptors -- heavy particles diffuse more slowly than light ones of the same size. We show this by simulation and by deriving an analytic formula for the mass-dependent diffusion coefficient in the overdamped limit. We estimate the magnitude of this effect for a range of biophysical ligand-receptor systems, and find it is potentially observable for tailored micronscale DNA-coated colloids.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2112.05266,
title = {Mass changes the diffusion coefficient of particles with ligand-receptor contacts in the overdamped limit},
author = {Sophie Marbach and Miranda Holmes-Cerfon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.05266},
year = {2022}
}