Related papers: Microbial narrow-escape is facilitated by wall int…
Questions of flux regulation in biological cells raise renewed interest in the narrow escape problem. The often inadequate expansions of the narrow escape time are due to a not so well known fact that the boundary singularity of Green's…
The incessant activity of swimming microorganisms has a direct physical effect on surrounding microscopic objects, leading to enhanced diffusion far beyond the level of Brownian motion with possible influences on the spatial distribution of…
Microorganisms, such as bacteria and microalgae, often live in habitats consisting of a liquid phase and a plethora of interfaces. The precise ways in which these motile microbes behave in their confined environment remain unclear. Using…
It is often desirable to know the controlling mechanism of survival probability of nano - or microscale particles in small cavities such as, e.g., confined submicron particles in fiber beds of high-efficiency filter media or ions/small…
The narrow escape problem deals with the calculation of the mean escape time (MET) of a Brownian particle from a bounded domain through a small hole on the domain's boundary. Here we develop a formalism that allows us to evaluate the…
The stochastic motion of particles in living cells is often spatially inhomogeneous with a higher effective diffusivity in a region close to the cell boundary due to active transport along actin filaments. As a first step to understand the…
Intracellular transport in living cells is often spatially inhomogeneous with an accelerated effective diffusion close to the cell membrane and a ballistic motion away from the centrosome due to active transport along actin filaments and…
Interactions between microorganisms and solid boundaries play an important role in biological processes, like egg fertilisation, biofilm formation and soil colonisation, where microswimmers move within a structured environment. Despite…
Motivated by recent experiments demonstrating that motile algae get trapped in draining foams, we study the trajectories of microorganisms confined in model foam channels (section of a Plateau border). We track single Chlamydomonas…
The microalga Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii (CR) is used here as a model system to study the effect of complex environments on the swimming of micro-organisms. Its motion can be modelled by a run and tumble mechanism so that it describes a…
We investigate a diffusive motion of a system of interacting Brownian particles in quasi-one-dimensional micropores. In particular, we consider a semi-infinite 1D geometry with a partially absorbing boundary and the hard-core inter-particle…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
The slow dynamics in a glassy hard-sphere system is dominated by cage breaking events, i.e., rearrangements where a particle escapes from the cage formed by its neighboring particles. We study such events for an overdamped colloidal system…
Brownian escape is key to a wealth of physico-chemical processes, including polymer folding, and information storage. The frequency of thermally activated energy barrier crossings is assumed to generally decrease exponentially with…
Suspensions of motile microorganisms can spontaneously form large-scale fluid motion, known as bioconvection, characterized by dense downwelling plumes separated by broad upwelling regions. In this study, we investigate bioconvection in…
The narrow escape problem is a first-passage problem concerned with randomly moving particles in a physical domain, being trapped by absorbing surface traps (windows), such that the measure of traps is small compared to the domain size. The…
We study the narrow escape problem in the disk, which consists in identifying the first exit time and first exit point distribution of a Brownian particle from the ball in dimension 2, with reflecting boundary conditions except on small…
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…
Contact between particles and motile cells underpins a wide variety of biological processes, from nutrient capture and ligand binding, to grazing, viral infection and cell-cell communication. The window of opportunity for these interactions…
The mean first passage time (MFPT) for a Brownian particle to reach a small target in cellular microdomains is a key parameter for chemical activation. Although asymptotic estimations of the MFPT are available for various geometries, these…