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Synthesis of Cyclic Polymers and Characterization of Their Diffusive Motion in the Melt State at the Single Molecule Level
Published on: September 26, 2016
Nonergodic subdiffusion from transient interactions with heterogeneous partners
C Charalambous1, G Muñoz-Gil1, A Celi1
1ICFO-Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, 08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain.
Abstract:
Spatiotemporal disorder has been recently associated to the occurrence of anomalous nonergodic diffusion of molecular components in biological systems, but the underlying microscopic mechanism is still unclear. We introduce a model in which a particle performs continuous Brownian motion with changes of diffusion coefficients induced by transient molecular interactions with diffusive binding partners. In spite of the exponential distribution of waiting times, the model shows subdiffusion and nonergodicity similar to the heavy-tailed continuous time random walk. The dependence of these properties on the density of binding partners is analyzed and discussed. Our work provides an experimentally testable microscopic model to investigate the nature of nonergodicity in disordered media.
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