Browsing by Subject "Brownian movement"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Open Access
Active particles in complex and crowded environments
(American Physical Society, 2016-11) Bechinger, C.; Di Leonardo, R.; Löwen, H.; Reichhardt, C.; Volpe, G.
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 biological realm, many cells perform directed motion, for example, as a way to browse for nutrients or to avoid toxins. Inspired by these motile microorganisms, researchers have been developing artificial particles that feature similar swimming behaviors based on different mechanisms. These man-made micromachines and nanomachines hold a great potential as autonomous agents for health care, sustainability, and security applications. With a focus on the basic physical features of the interactions of self-propelled Brownian particles with a crowded and complex environment, this comprehensive review will provide a guided tour through its basic principles, the development of artificial self-propelling microparticles and nanoparticles, and their application to the study of nonequilibrium phenomena, as well as the open challenges that the field is currently facing.
Open Access
Brownian gyrator: an experimental realization
(OSA, 2017) Soni, Jalpa; Argun, A.; Dabelow, L.; Bo, S.; Eichhorn, R.; Pesce, G.; Volpe, Giovanni
We present an experimental realization of a minimal heat engine in the form of a single Brownian particle, performing gyrating motion by systematic torque generation due to dissipation from two different heat baths in a simple optical tweezer set-up.
Open Access
Controlling active brownian particles in complex settings
(OSA, 2017) Velu, Sabareesh K. P.; Pinçe, Erçağ; Callegari, Agnese; Elahi, Parviz; Gigan, S.; Volpe, Giovanni; Volpe, G.
We show active Brownian particles (passive Brownian particles in a bacterial bath) switches between two long-term behaviors, i.e. gathering and dispersal of individuals, in response to the statistical properties of the underlying optical potential.
Open Access
Engineering particle trajectories in microfluidic flows using speckle light fields
(SPIE, 2014) Volpe, G.; Volpe, Giovanni; Gigan, S.
Optical tweezers have been widely used in physics, chemistry and biology to manipulate and trap microscopic and nanoscopic objects. Current optical trapping techniques rely on carefully engineered setups to manipulate nanoscopic and microscopic objects at the focus of a laser beam. Since the quality of the trapping is strongly dependent on the focus quality, these systems have to be very carefully aligned and optimized, thus limiting their practical applicability in complex environments. One major challenge for current optical manipulation techniques is the light scattering occurring in optically complex media, such as biological tissues, turbid liquids and rough surfaces, which give rise to apparently random light fields known as speckles. Here, we discuss an experimental implementation to perform optical manipulation based on speckles. In particular, we show how to take advantage of the statistical properties of speckle patterns in order to realize a setup based on a multimode optical fiber to perform basic optical manipulation tasks such as trapping, guiding and sorting. We anticipate that the simplicity of these "speckle optical tweezers" will greatly broaden the perspectives of optical manipulation for real-life applications. © 2014 SPIE.
Open Access
Engineering sensorial delay to control phototaxis and emergent collective behaviors
(American Physical Society, 2016-01) Mijalkov, M.; McDaniel, A.; Wehr, J.; Volpe, G.
Collective motions emerging from the interaction of autonomous mobile individuals play a key role in many phenomena, from the growth of bacterial colonies to the coordination of robotic swarms. For these collective behaviors to take hold, the individuals must be able to emit, sense, and react to signals. When dealing with simple organisms and robots, these signals are necessarily very elementary; e.g., a cell might signal its presence by releasing chemicals and a robot by shining light. An additional challenge arises because the motion of the individuals is often noisy; e.g., the orientation of cells can be altered by Brownian motion and that of robots by an uneven terrain. Therefore, the emphasis is on achieving complex and tunable behaviors fromsimple autonomous agents communicating with each other in robust ways. Here, we show that the delay between sensing and reacting to a signal can determine the individual and collective long-term behavior of autonomous agents whose motion is intrinsically noisy. We experimentally demonstrate that the collective behavior of a group of phototactic robots capable of emitting a radially decaying light field can be tuned from segregation to aggregation and clustering by controlling the delay with which they change their propulsion speed in response to the light intensity they measure. We track this transition to the underlying dynamics of this system, in particular, to the ratio between the robots' sensorial delay time and the characteristic time of the robots' random reorientation. Supported by numerics, we discuss how the same mechanism can be applied to control active agents, e.g., airborne drones, moving in a three-dimensional space. Given the simplicity of this mechanism, the engineering of sensorial delay provides a potentially powerful tool to engineer and dynamically tune the behavior of large ensembles of autonomous mobile agents; furthermore, this mechanism might already be at work within living organisms such as chemotactic cells.
Open Access
Non-Boltzmann stationary distributions and nonequilibrium relations in active baths
(American Physical Society, 2016-12) Argun, A.; Moradi A.-R.; Pinçe, E.; Bagci, G. B.; Imparato, A.; Volpe, G.
Most natural and engineered processes, such as biomolecular reactions, protein folding, and population dynamics, occur far from equilibrium and therefore cannot be treated within the framework of classical equilibrium thermodynamics. Here we experimentally study how some fundamental thermodynamic quantities and relations are affected by the presence of the nonequilibrium fluctuations associated with an active bath. We show in particular that, as the confinement of the particle increases, the stationary probability distribution of a Brownian particle confined within a harmonic potential becomes non-Boltzmann, featuring a transition from a Gaussian distribution to a heavy-tailed distribution. Because of this, nonequilibrium relations (e.g., the Jarzynski equality and Crooks fluctuation theorem) cannot be applied. We show that these relations can be restored by using the effective potential associated with the stationary probability distribution. We corroborate our experimental findings with theoretical arguments.
Open Access
Numerical simulation of optically trapped particles
(SPIE, 2014) Volpe, G.; Volpe, Giovanni
Some randomness is present in most phenomena, ranging from biomolecules and nanodevices to financial markets and human organizations. However, it is not easy to gain an intuitive understanding of such stochastic phenomena, because their modeling requires advanced mathematical tools, such as sigma algebras, the Itô formula and martingales. Here, we discuss a simple finite difference algorithm that can be used to gain understanding of such complex physical phenomena. In particular, we simulate the motion of an optically trapped particle that is typically used as a model system in statistical physics and has a wide range of applications in physics and biophysics, for example, to measure nanoscopic forces and torques.
Open Access
On the modeling of CO2 EUA and CER prices of EU-ETS for the 2008–2012 period
(John Wiley and Sons, 2016) Gürler, Ü.; Yenigün, D.; Çağlar, M.; Berk, E.
Increased consumption of fossil fuels in industrial production has led to a significant elevation in the emission of greenhouse gases and to global warming. The most effective international action against global warming is the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to reduce carbon emissions to desired levels in a certain time span. Carbon trading is one of the mechanisms used to achieve the desired reductions. One of the most important implications of carbon trading for industrial systems is the risk of uncertainty about the prices of carbon allowance permits traded in the carbon markets. In this paper, we consider stochastic and time series modeling of carbon market prices and provide estimates of the model parameters involved, based on the European Union emissions trading scheme carbon allowances data obtained for 2008–2012 period. In particular, we consider fractional Brownian motion and autoregressive moving average–generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic modeling of the European Union emissions trading scheme data and provide comparisons with benchmark models. Our analysis reveals evidence for structural changes in the underlying models in the span of the years 2008–2012. Data-driven methods for identifying possible change-points in the underlying models are employed, and a detailed analysis is provided. Our analysis indicated change-points in the European Union Allowance (EUA) prices in the first half of 2009 and in the second half of 2011, whereas in the Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) prices three change-points have appeared, in the first half of 2009, the middle of 2011, and in the second half of 2012. These change-points seem to parallel the global economic indicators as well.
Open Access
Optical manipulation with random light fields: from fundamental physics to applications
(OSA, 2015) Volpe, G.; Gigan, S.; Volpe, Giovanni
Speckles are random light fields that share some universal statistical properties. Because of this, they can be used to perform deterministic optical manipulation tasks on a Brownian particle as well as control its diffusion properties.