We investigate the dynamics of a single tracer exploring a course of fixed obstacles in the vicinity of the percolation transition for particles confined to the infinite cluster. The mean-square displacement displays anomalous transport, which extends to infinite times precisely at the critical obstacle density. The slowing down of the diffusion coefficient exhibits power-law behavior for densities close to the critical point and we show that the mean-square displacement fulfills a scaling hypothesis. Furthermore, we calculate the dynamic conductivity as response to an alternating electric field. Last, we discuss the non-gaussian parameter as an indicator for heterogeneous dynamics.
Two-dimensional networks of ordered quantum dots beyond the percolation threshold are studied, as typical example of conducting nanostructures with quenched random disorder. Theory predicts anomalous diffusion with stretched-exponential relaxation at short distances, and computer simulations on lattices of crossing, straight paths of random length confirm such a behavior. Anomalous diffusion is interpreted as resulting from the higher probability of taking straight, or ballistic paths, when the traveled distance is comparable or shorter than the lattice characteristic length. Diffusion turns o…
We study chemotaxis in a porous medium using as a model a biased ("hungry") random walk on a percolating cluster. In close resemblance to the 1980s arcade game Pac-Man, the hungry random walker consumes food, which is initially distributed in the maze, and biases its movement towards food-filled sites. We observe that, on the percolating cluster, the mean-squared displacement of the pacman process shows anomalous dynamics, which follow a power law with a dynamical exponent different from both that of a self avoiding random walk as well as that of an unbiased random walk. The change in dynamics…
We derive the long-time dynamics of a tracer immersed in a one-dimensional active bath. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the damping and noise correlations possess long-time tails with exponents that depend on the tracer symmetry. For generic tracers, shape asymmetry induces ratchet effects that alter fluctuations and lead to superdiffusion and friction that grows with time when the tracer is dragged at a constant speed. In the singular limit of a completely symmetric tracer, we recover normal diffusion and finite friction. Furthermore, for small symmetric tracers, the active cont…
Anomalous diffusion phenomenon is an intriguing process that tracer diffusion presents in numerous complex systems. Current experimental and theoretical investigations have reported the emergence of random diffusivity scenarios accompanied by the heterogeneity of the $α$-anomalous diffusion exponents. In this framework, we investigate a heterogeneous ensemble of tracers governed by scaled Brownian motion (sBm). The heterogeneous features are considered on anomalous diffusion exponent and diffusivity. To analyse such systems, we introduce the truncated-Gaussian and truncated chi-squared distrib…
We study the nonlinear response to an external force of an inertial tracer advected by a two-dimensional incompressible laminar flow and subject to thermal noise. In addition to the driving external field $F$, the main parameters in the system are the noise amplitude $D_0$ and the characteristic Stokes time $τ$ of the tracer. The relation velocity vs force shows interesting effects, such as negative differential mobility (NDM), namely a non-monotonic behavior of the tracer velocity as a function of the applied force, and absolute negative mobility (ANM), i.e. a net motion against the bias. By …
A topic of intense current investigation pursues the question how the highly crowded environment of biological cells affects the dynamic properties of passively diffusing particles. Motivated by recent experiments we report results of extensive simulations of the motion of a finite sized tracer particle in a heterogeneously crowded environment. For given spatial distributions of monodisperse crowders we demonstrate how anomalous diffusion with strongly non-Gaussian features arises in this model system. We investigate both biologically relevant situations of particles released either at the sur…
Anomalous diffusion constitutes a relation between tracer flux and tracer density gradient that is inherently nonlocal in space and/or time. Previous studies emphasize the non-Gaussian character of the tracer distribution that arises from adjusted constitutive relations but did not investigate the flux-gradient memory itself. Here, we present a universal analytic framework that enables systematic characterisation of nonlocality in a wide variety of transport regimes. A generalised diffusivity kernel $D^{\ast}$ fully embodies the spatiotemporal flux memory with respect to the gradient. An exten…
Several experiments on tagged molecules or particles in living systems suggest that they move anomalously slow - their mean squared displacement (MSD) increase slower than linearly with time. Leading models aimed at understanding these experiments predict that the MSD grows as a power law with a growth exponent that is smaller than unity. However, in some experiments the exponent is so small $(\sim 0.1-0.2)$ that they hint towards other mechanisms at play. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate how in-plane collective modes excited by thermal fluctuations in a two dimensional membrane lea…
We consider one-dimensional systems comprising either active run-and-tumble particles (RTPs) or passive Brownian random walkers. These particles are either noninteracting or have hardcore exclusions. We study the dynamics of a single tracer particle embedded in such a system - this tracer may be either active or passive, with hardcore exclusion from environmental particles. In an active hardcore environment, both active and passive tracers show long-time subdiffusion: displacements scale as $t^{1/4}$ with a density-dependent prefactor that is independent of tracer type, and differs from the co…
Measurements of local stresses on the cancer cells (CCs), inferred by embedding inert compressible tracer particles (TPs) in a growing multicellular spheroid (MCS), show that pressure decreases monotonically as the distance from the core of the MCS increases. How faithfully do the TPs report the local stresses in the CCs is an important question because pressure buildup in the MCS is dynamically generated due to CC division, which implies that the CC dynamics should be minimally altered by the TPs. Here using theory and simulations, we show that although the TP dynamics is unusual, exhibiting …
We present a framework for systems in which diffusion-advection transport of a tracer substance in a mobile zone is interrupted by trapping in an immobile zone. Our model unifies different model approaches based on distributed-order diffusion equations, exciton diffusion rate models, and random walk models for multi-rate mobile-immobile mass transport. We study various forms for the trapping time dynamics and their effects on the tracer mass in the mobile zone. Moreover we find the associated breakthrough curves, the tracer density at a fixed point in space as function of time, as well as the …
Optical tweezers setup is often used to probe the motion of individual tracer particle, which promotes the study of relaxation dynamics of a generic process confined in a harmonic potential. We uncover the dependence of ensemble- and time-averaged mean square displacements of confined processes on the velocity correlation function $C(t,t+τ)$ of the original process. With two different scaling forms of $C(t,t+τ)$ for small $τ$ and large $τ$, the stationary value and the relaxation behaviors can be obtained immediately. The gotten results are valid for a large amount of anomalous diffusion proce…
Swimming microorganisms rely on effective mixing strategies to achieve efficient nutrient influx. Recent experiments, probing the mixing capability of unicellular biflagellates, revealed that passive tracer particles exhibit anomalous non-Gaussian diffusion when immersed in a dilute suspension of self-motile Chlamydomonas reinhardtii algae. Qualitatively, this observation can be explained by the fact that the algae induce a fluid flow that may occasionally accelerate the colloidal tracers to relatively large velocities. A satisfactory quantitative theory of enhanced mixing in dilute active sus…
A mixture of dissipative hard grains generically exhibits a breakdown of kinetic energy equipartition. The undriven and thus freely cooling binary problem, in the tracer limit where the density of one species becomes minute, may exhibit an extreme form of this breakdown, with the minority species carrying a finite fraction of the total kinetic energy of the system. We investigate the fingerprint of this non-equilibrium phase transition, akin to an ordering process, on transport properties. The analysis, performed by solving the Boltzmann kinetic equation from a combination of analytical and Mo…
We investigate the dynamics of a single tracer particle performing Brownian motion in a two-dimensional course of randomly distributed hard obstacles. At a certain critical obstacle density, the motion of the tracer becomes anomalous over many decades in time, which is rationalized in terms of an underlying percolation transition of the void space. In the vicinity of this critical density the dynamics follows the anomalous one up to a crossover time scale where the motion becomes either diffusive or localized. We analyze the scaling behavior of the time-dependent diffusion coefficient D(t) inc…
We study a minimal model of self-propelled particle in a crowded single-file environment. We extend classical models of exclusion processes (previously analyzed for diffusive and driven tracer particles) to the case where the tracer particle is a run-and-tumble particle (RTP), while all bath particles perform symmetric random walks. In the limit of high density of bath particles, we derive exact expressions for the full distribution $\mathcal{P}_n(X)$ of the RTP position $X$ and all its cumulants, valid for arbitrary values of the tumbling probability $α$ and time $n$. Our results highlight st…
Anomalous Diffusion in Driven Electrolytes due to Hydrodynamic Fluctuations
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization（马克斯·普朗克动力学与自组织研究所）；Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford（牛津大学鲁道夫·皮尔斯理论物理中心）
We analyse mobile-immobile transport of particles that switch between the mobile and immobile phases with finite rates. Despite this seemingly simple assumption of Poissonian switching we unveil a rich transport dynamics including significant transient anomalous diffusion and non-Gaussian displacement distributions. Our discussion is based on experimental parameters for tau proteins in neuronal cells, but the results obtained here are expected to be of relevance for a broad class of processes in complex systems. Concretely, we obtain that when the mean binding time is significantly longer than…
Heterogeneous media constitute random disordered environments where transport is drastically hindered. Employing extensive molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of tracer particles in the Lorentz model in the vicinity of the localization transition. There transport becomes anomalous and non-gaussian due to the presence of self-similar spatial structures, and dynamic scaling behavior is anticipated. The interplay of different time and length scales is revealed by the intermediate scattering functions, which are sensitive both to the underlying spatial fract…
A particle-resolved rheological study of chirality transfer and odd transport
Raymond & Beverly Sackler School of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学雷蒙德和贝弗利·萨克勒化学学院）；Institut für Theoretische Physik II: Weiche Materie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫海因里希·海涅大学理论物理第二研究所：软物质）；Physics department, University of Rome La Sapienza（罗马第一大学物理系）；Raymond & Beverly Sackler School of Physics and astronomy, Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学雷蒙德和贝弗利·萨克勒物理与天文学学院）
We study a two-dimensional diffusive motion of a tracer particle in restricted, crowded anisotropic geometries. The underlying medium is the same as in our previous work [J. Chem. Phys. 140, 044706 (2014)] in which standard, gaussian diffusion was studied. Here, a tracer is allowed to perform Cauchy random walk with uncorrelated steps. Our analysis shows that presence of obstacles significantly influences motion, which in an obstacle-free space would be of a superdiffusive type. At the same time, the selfdiffusive process reveals different anomalous properties, both at the level of a single tr…
Time-dependent dynamics in the confined lattice Lorentz gas
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学理论物理研究所）；Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics, Department of Physics and Materials Science, University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学物理与材料科学系复杂系统与统计力学）；Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica e Aerospaziale, Sapienza Università di Roma（罗马智慧大学机械与航空航天工程系）；Laboratory of Molecular Simulation (LSMO), Institut des Sciences et Ingénierie Chimiques, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院化学科学与工程研究所分子模拟实验室）；Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Laboratoire PHENIX (Physico-Chimie des Electrolytes et Nanosystèmes Interfaciaux)（索邦大学CNRS界面电解质和纳米系统物理化学实验室）；Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée, CNRS/UPMC（CNRS/巴黎第六大学凝聚态物质理论物理实验室）
Particle transport in complex environments such as the interior of living cells is often (transiently) non-Fickian or anomalous, that is, it deviates from the laws of Brownian motion. Such anomalies may be the result of small-scale spatio-temporal heterogeneities in, or viscoelastic properties of, the medium, molecular crowding, etc. Often the observed dynamics displays multi-state characteristics, i.e. distinct modes of transport dynamically interconverting between each other in a stochastic manner. Reliably distinguishing between single- and multi-state dynamics is challenging and requires a…
