Mortal Brownian motion: Three short stories

Short Timescale Effects in Brownian Motion

To my beautiful family, for all the help they have given me.

Brownian motion in short range random potentials

A. H. Romero and J. M. Sancho Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0354 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0340 Institute for Nonlinear Science, Department 0407, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0407 and Departament d’Estructu...

Brownian motion at short time scales

Brownian Brownian Motion – I

A classical model of Brownian motion consists of a heavy molecule submerged into a gas of light atoms in a closed container. In this work we study a 2D version of this model, where the molecule is a heavy disk of mass M ≫ 1 and the gas is represented by just one point particle of mass m = 1, which interacts with the disk and the walls of the container via elastic collisions. Chaotic behavior of...

Colloidal suspensions, Brownian motion, molecular reality: a short history

In the first decade of the 20th century, nearly a hundred years of work on the phenomenon of Brownian motion culminated in theory and experiments that demonstrated irrefutably the discontinuous or molecular nature of matter. Colloidal suspensions and the phenomenon of Brownian motion thus became the key to confirmation of the ‘new world-view’ of statistical mechanics, the statistical basis of t...