Biased diffusive transport of Brownian particles through irregularly shaped, narrow confining quasi-one-dimensional structures is investigated. The complexity of the higher dimensional diffusive dynamics is reduced by means of the so-called Fick-Jacobs approximation, yielding an effective one-dimensional stochastic dynamics. Accordingly, the elimination of transverse, equilibrated degrees of fr...

As models for biological molecular motors, Brownian motors have been studied recently by many workers, and their physical properties such as velocity, efficiency, and so on, have been investigated. They have also attracted much interest in an application to nanoscale technology. It is significant to study more complex systems, that is, coupled Brownian motors, in detail, since Brownian motors w...

The focus of this thesis is the development and application of a novel technique for investigating the structure and dynamics of weak interactions between and within single-molecules. This approach is designed to explore unusual features in bi-directional transitions near equilibrium. The basic idea is to infer molecular events by observing changes in the threedimensional Brownian fluctuations ...

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles with highly nonlinear magnetic behavior are attractive for biomedical applications like magnetic particle imaging and magnetic fluid hyperthermia. Such particles display interesting magnetic properties in alternating magnetic fields and here we document experiments that show differences between the magnetization dynamics of certain particles in frozen ...

In the coarse grained Brownian Dynamics simulation method the many solvent molecules are replaced by random thermal kicks and an effective friction acting on the particles of interest. For Brownian Dynamics the friction has to be so strong that the particles’ velocities are damped much faster than the duration of an integration timestep. Here we show that this conceptual limit can be dropped wi...

Based on extensive Brownian dynamics simulations we study the thermally driven motion of a tracer bead in a cross-linked, dynamic gel network in the limit when the tracer bead’s size is of the same size or even larger than the equilibrium mesh size of the gel. The analysis of long individual trajectories of the tracer bead demonstrates the existence of pronounced transient anomalous diffusion, ...

We present an algorithm for performing rigid-body Brownian dynamics that can take into account the hydrodynamic properties (translational and rotational friction tensors and the coupling between them) of each rigid body. In the zero temperature limit, the error term scales as Delta;{4} for time step Delta , while at nonzero temperatures the error scaling is Delta;{5/2} . We test the algorithm b...

Studying the Brownian motion of a system driven by an external control from one macroscopic state to another macroscopic state, this paper presents the derivation of a nonlinear fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT). The new FDT relates the nonequilibrium work to the equilibrium free-energy difference in a very simple manner. It is valid wherever the Brownian dynamics is applicable. It recovers...