Escape of a sticky particle

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 a detailed understanding of this phenomenon remains illusive. To tackle this problem, we develop an ana...

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Main Authors: Yuval Scher, Shlomi Reuveni, Denis S. Grebenkov
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2023-12-01
Series:Physical Review Research
Online Access:http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.043196
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author Yuval Scher
Shlomi Reuveni
Denis S. Grebenkov
author_facet Yuval Scher
Shlomi Reuveni
Denis S. Grebenkov
author_sort Yuval Scher
collection DOAJ
description 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 a detailed understanding of this phenomenon remains illusive. To tackle this problem, we develop an analytical approach to the escape of a diffusing particle from a domain of arbitrary shape, size, and surface reactivity. This is used to elucidate the effect of stickiness on the escape time from a slab domain, revealing how adsorption and desorption rates affect the mean and variance and providing an approach to infer these rates from measurements. Moreover, as any smooth boundary is locally flat, slab results are leveraged to devise a numerically efficient scheme for simulating sticky boundaries in arbitrary domains. Generalizing our analysis to higher dimensions reveals that the mean escape time abides a general structure that is independent of the dimensionality of the problem. This paper thus offers a starting point for analytical and numerical studies of stickiness and its role in escape, first-passage, and diffusion-controlled reactions.
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spelling doaj.art-8b6323ebebac49fd94b49374cd483dd82024-04-12T17:36:32ZengAmerican Physical SocietyPhysical Review Research2643-15642023-12-015404319610.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.043196Escape of a sticky particleYuval ScherShlomi ReuveniDenis S. GrebenkovAdsorption 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 a detailed understanding of this phenomenon remains illusive. To tackle this problem, we develop an analytical approach to the escape of a diffusing particle from a domain of arbitrary shape, size, and surface reactivity. This is used to elucidate the effect of stickiness on the escape time from a slab domain, revealing how adsorption and desorption rates affect the mean and variance and providing an approach to infer these rates from measurements. Moreover, as any smooth boundary is locally flat, slab results are leveraged to devise a numerically efficient scheme for simulating sticky boundaries in arbitrary domains. Generalizing our analysis to higher dimensions reveals that the mean escape time abides a general structure that is independent of the dimensionality of the problem. This paper thus offers a starting point for analytical and numerical studies of stickiness and its role in escape, first-passage, and diffusion-controlled reactions.http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.043196
spellingShingle Yuval Scher
Shlomi Reuveni
Denis S. Grebenkov
Escape of a sticky particle
Physical Review Research
title Escape of a sticky particle
title_full Escape of a sticky particle
title_fullStr Escape of a sticky particle
title_full_unstemmed Escape of a sticky particle
title_short Escape of a sticky particle
title_sort escape of a sticky particle
url http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.043196
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