Related papers: Dissociation rates from single-molecule pulling ex…
We consider the thermal breakage of a tethered polymer chain of discrete segments coupled by Morse potentials under constant tensile stress. The chain dynamics at the onset of fracture is studied analytically by Kramers-Langer…
We show that Kramers rate theory gives a straightforward, accurate estimate of the closing time $\tau_c$ of a semiflexible polymer that is valid in cases of physical interest. The calculation also reveals how the time scales of chain…
Single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments, as well as a number of other physical systems, are governed by thermally activated transitions out of a metastable state under the action of a steadily increasing external force. The main…
Heterogeneity in biological molecules, resulting in molecule-to-molecule variations in their dynamics and function, is an emerging theme. To elucidate the consequences of heterogeneous behavior at the single molecule level, we propose an…
Swept bias experiments carried out on Josephson junctions yield the distributions of the probabilities of early switching from the zero voltage state. Kramers' theory of thermally activated escape from a one-dimensional potential is well…
We study response and velocity autocorrelation functions for a tagged particle in a shear driven suspension governed by underdamped stochastic dynamics. We follow the idea of an effective confinement in dense suspensions and exploit a…
Systems that evolve towards a state from which they cannot depart are common in nature. But the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, a fundamental result in statistical mechanics, is mainly restricted to systems near-stationarity. In processes…
Thermal activation of dislocations is critical for predicting the mechanical response of materials under common experimental conditions. According to transition state theory (TST), the rate for the system to overcome free energy barriers…
The force-assisted desorption kinetics of a macromolecule from adhesive surface is studied theoretically, using the notion of tensile (Pincus) blobs, as well as by means of Monte-Carlo (MC) and Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. We show…
Complex systems can convert energy imparted by nonequilibrium forces to regulate how quickly they transition between long lived states. While such behavior is ubiquitous in natural and synthetic systems, currently there is no general…
Biochemical signaling cascades transmit intracellular information while dissipating energy under nonequilibrium conditions. We model a cascade as a code string and apply information-entropy ideas to quantify an optimal transmission rate. A…
Analysis of bond rupture data from single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments commonly relies on the strong assumption that the bond dissociation process is irreversible. However, with increased spatiotemporal resolution of instruments…
Escape from a potential well is an extreme example of transient behavior. We consider the escape of the harmonically forced particle under viscous damping from the benchmark truncated weakly nonlinear potential well. Main attention is paid…
We explore the natural limit of binomial reducibility in nuclear multifragmentation by constructing excitation functions for intermediate mass fragments (IMF) of a given element Z. The resulting multiplicity distributions for each window of…
We show how to construct non-equilibrium thermodynamics for systems too small to be considered thermodynamically in a traditional sense. Through the use of a non-equilibrium ensemble of many replicas of the system which can be viewed as a…
The interplay of migration, recombination, and dissociation of excitons in disordered media is studied theoretically in the low temperature regime. An exact expression for the photoluminescence spectrum is obtained. The theory is applied to…
Single electron tunneling through a single impurity level is used to probe the fluctuations of the local density of states in the emitter. The energy dependence of quasi-particle relaxation in the emitter can be extracted from the damping…
Thermally activated particle motion in disorder potentials is controlled by the large-$\Delta V$ tail of the distribution of height $\Delta V$ of the potential barriers created by the disorder. We employ the optimal fluctuation method to…
We consider the random fluctuations of the free energy in the $p$-spin version of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model in the high temperature regime. Using the martingale approach of Comets and Neveu as used in the standard SK model combined…
In a growing number of strongly disordered and dense systems, the dynamics of a particle pulled by an external force field exhibits super-diffusion. In the context of glass forming systems, super cooled glasses and contamination spreading…