Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments

Active particles in complex and crowded environments

Differently from passive Brownian particles, active particles, also known as self-propelled Brownian particles or microswimmers and nanoswimmers, are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion. Because of this constant flow of energy, their behavior can be explained and understood only within the framework of nonequilibrium physics. In the biologic...

Complex dynamics of fluids in disordered and crowded environments.

Helical tubes in crowded environments.

When placed in a crowded environment, a semiflexible tube is forced to fold so as to make a more compact shape. One compact shape that often arises in nature is the tight helix, especially when the tube thickness is of comparable size to the tube length. In this paper we use an excluded volume effect to model the effects of crowding. This gives us a measure of compactness for configurations of ...

Polymer translocation in crowded environments.

We study the effect of the crowded environments on the translocation of a polymer through a pore in a membrane. By systematically treating the entropic penalty due to crowding, we show that the translocation dynamics are significantly altered, leading to novel scaling behaviors of the translocation time. We also observe new and qualitatively different translocation regimes depending upon the ex...

Optimization in Uncertain and Complex Dynamic Environments with Evolutionary Methods

In the real world, many of the optimization issues are dynamic, uncertain, and complex in which the objective function or constraints can be changed over time. Consequently, the optimum of these issues is changed nonlinearly. Therefore, the optimization algorithms not only should search the global optimum value in the space but also should follow the path of optimal change in dynamic environmen...