TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sposini, Vittoria
A1  - Krapf, Diego
A1  - Marinari, Enzo
A1  - Sunyer, Raimon
A1  - Ritort, Felix
A1  - Taheri, Fereydoon
A1  - Selhuber-Unkel, Christine
A1  - Benelli, Rebecca
A1  - Weiss, Matthias
A1  - Metzler, Ralf
A1  - Oshanin, Gleb
T1  - Towards a robust criterion of anomalous diffusion
T2  - Communications Physics
N2  - Anomalous-diffusion, the departure of the spreading dynamics of diffusing particles from the traditional law of Brownian-motion, is a signature feature of a large number of complex soft-matter and biological systems. Anomalous-diffusion emerges due to a variety of physical mechanisms, e.g., trapping interactions or the viscoelasticity of the environment. However, sometimes systems dynamics are erroneously claimed to be anomalous, despite the fact that the true motion is Brownian—or vice versa. This ambiguity in establishing whether the dynamics as normal or anomalous can have far-reaching consequences, e.g., in predictions for reaction- or relaxation-laws. Demonstrating that a system exhibits normal- or anomalous-diffusion is highly desirable for a vast host of applications. Here, we present a criterion for anomalous-diffusion based on the method of power-spectral analysis of single trajectories. The robustness of this criterion is studied for trajectories of fractional-Brownian-motion, a ubiquitous stochastic process for the description of anomalous-diffusion, in the presence of two types of measurement errors. In particular, we find that our criterion is very robust for subdiffusion. Various tests on surrogate data in absence or presence of additional positional noise demonstrate the efficacy of this method in practical contexts. Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept based on diverse experiments exhibiting both normal and anomalous-diffusion.
Y1  - 2022
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/58597
SN  - 2399-3650
VL  - 5
PB  - Springer Nature
CY  - London
ER  -