Related papers: Microbial narrow-escape is facilitated by wall int…
The effect of mechanical interactions between cells in the spreading of bacterial populations was investigated in one-dimensional space. A continuum-mechanics approach, comprising cell migration, proliferation, and exclusion processes, was…
Inspired by the collective phenomenon of territorial emergence, whereby animals move and interact through the scent marks they deposit, we study the dynamics of a 1D Brownian walker in a random environment consisting of confining boundaries…
Microorganisms navigate through fluid, often confined by complex environments, to survive and sustain life. Inspired by this fact, we consider a model system and seek to understand the wall curvature driven dynamics of a squirmer, a…
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be…
We study active surface wetting using a minimal model of bacteria that takes into account the intrinsic motility diversity of living matter. A mixture of "fast" and "slow" self-propelled Brownian particles is considered in the presence of a…
Many forms of cell motility rely on Brownian ratchet mechanisms that involve multiple stochastic processes. We present a computational and theoretical study of the nonequilibrium statistical dynamics of such a many-body ratchet, in the…
The exceptional reactivity of animal collectives to predatory attacks is thought to be due to rapid, but local, transfer of information between group members. These groups turn together in unison and produce escape waves. However, it is not…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
The narrow escape problem concerns the time needed for a diffusing particle to exit a confining domain through a small hole in the boundary. While this problem is now well-understood, determining the escape time for a particle that must…
We investigate the outflux of ions through the channels in a cell membrane. The channels undergo an open/close cycle according to a periodic schedule. Our study is based both on theoretical considerations relying on homogenization theory,…
The ability to control the location of nanoscale objects in liquids is essential for fundamental and applied research from nanofluidics to molecular biology. To overcome their random Brownian motion, the electrostatic fluidic trap creates…
We consider Brownian motion in a circular disk $\Omega$, whose boundary $\p\Omega$ is reflecting, except for a small arc, $\p\Omega_a$, which is absorbing. As $\epsilon=|\partial \Omega_a|/|\partial \Omega|$ decreases to zero the mean time…
The existence of travelling waves for a model of concentration waves of bacteria is investigated. The model consists in a kinetic equation for the biased motion of cells following a run-and-tumble process, coupled with two…
We study the escape of a chain of coupled units over the barrier of a metastable potential. It is demonstrated that a very weak external driving field with suitably chosen frequency suffices to accomplish speedy escape. The latter requires…
The L\'evy flight foraging hypothesis asserts that biological organisms have evolved to employ (truncated) L\'evy flight searches due to such strategies being more efficient than those based on Brownian motion. However, we provide here a…
Adsorption to a surface, reversible-binding, and trapping are all prevalent scenarios where particles exhibit "stickiness". Escape and first-passage times are known to be drastically affected, but detailed understanding of this phenomenon…
We study the dynamics of the passage of a stiff chain through a pore into a cell containing particles that bind reversibly to it. Using Brownian Molecular Dynamics simulations we investigate the mean-first-passage time as a function of the…
Dynamical properties of a few ultra-cold fermions confined in a double-well potential is studied. We show that the dynamics, which is governed by single-particle tunnelings for vanishing interactions, is completely different for strong…
Few- and many-fermion systems on the verge of stability, and consisting of strongly interacting particles, appear in many areas of physics. The theoretical modeling of such systems is a very difficult problem. In this work we present a…
We study exclusion processes on the integer lattice in which particles change their velocities due to stickiness. Specifically, whenever two or more particles occupy adjacent sites, they stick together for an extended period of time, and…