Related papers: Working under confinement
Stiff forces, which bind objects together or otherwise confine motion, are found widely in soft-matter systems - colloids with short range attractions, ligand-receptor contacts, particles in optical traps, fibres that resist stretching,…
Cells often divide under mechanical confinement, where surrounding structures restrict shape changes during cytokinesis. Although forces generated during confined division have been measured experimentally, it remains unclear how…
The transport of molecules in confined media is subject to entropic barriers. So theoretically, asymmetry of the confinement length may lead to molecular ratchets with entropy as the only driving force for the biased transport. We address…
Electromagnetically propelled helical nanoswimmers offer great potential for nanorobotic applications. Here, the effect of confinement on their propulsion is characterized using lattice-Boltzmann simulations. Two principal mechanisms give…
Routinely navigating through an ever-changing and unsteady environment, and utilizing chemical energy, molecular motors transport the cell's crucial components, such as neurotransmitters and organelles. They generate force and pull cargo,…
The stochastic driving force exerted by a single molecular motor (e.g., a kinesin, or myosin) moving on a periodic molecular track (microtubule, actin filament, etc.) is discussed from a general viewpoint open to experimental test. An…
Significant improvements have been achieved in motion control systems with the availability of high speed power switches and microcomputers on the market. Even though motor drivers are able to provide high torque control bandwidth under…
In a spatially periodic temperature profile, directed transport of an overdamped Brownian particle can be induced along a periodic potential. With a load force applied to the particle, this setup can perform as a heat engine. For a given…
Strong, scale-free disorder disrupts typical transport properties like the Stokes-Einstein relation and linear response, leading to anomalous, non-diffusive motion observed in amorphous materials, glasses, living cells, and other systems.…
Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…
A trapping mechanism is observed and proposed as the origin of the anomalous behavior recently discovered in transport properties of overdamped ratchets subject to external oscillatory drive in the presence of quenched noise. In particular,…
Colloids held by optical or magnetic tweezers have been used to explore the local rheological properties of a complex medium and to extract work from fluctuations with some appropriate protocols. However, a general theoretical understanding…
In both nature and engineering, loosely packed granular materials are often compacted inside confined geometries. Here, we explore such behaviour in a quasi-two dimensional geometry, where parallel rigid walls provide the confinement. We…
The efficiency of microscopic heat engines in a thermally heterogenous environment is considered. We show that, as a consequence of the recently discovered entropic anomaly, quasi-static engines, whose efficiency is maximal in a fluid at…
The statistics of the diffusive motion of particles often serve as an experimental proxy for their interaction with the environment. However, inferring the physical properties from the observed trajectories is challenging. Inspired by a…
Recent works on the concatenation of two simple heat engines have shown that it may lead to non-monotonic variations in the efficiency and power with parameters like driving amplitudes and asymmetries in cycle periods. Motivated by this…
The motion of a Brownian particle in the presence of Coulomb friction and an asymmetric spatial potential was evaluated in this study. The system exhibits a ratchet effect, i.e., an average directed motion even in the absence of an external…
The issue of magnetic confinement in magnetic fusion devices is addressed within a purely magnetic approach. Using some Hamiltonian models for the magnetic field lines, the dual impact of low magnetic shear is shown in a unified way. Away…
We propose a generalization of the stochastic resetting mechanism for a Brownian particle diffusing in a one-dimensional periodic potential: randomly in time, the particle gets reset at the bottom of the potential well it was in. Numerical…
Molecular motors play pivotal roles in organizing the interior of cells. A motor efficient in cargo transport would move along cytoskeletal filaments with a high speed and a minimal error in transport distance (or time) while consuming a…