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
JF  - 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
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-022-01079-8
SN  - 2399-3650
VL  - 5
PB  - Springer Nature
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Grebenkov, Denis S.
A1  - Metzler, Ralf
A1  - Oshanin, Gleb
T1  - Distribution of first-reaction times with target regions on boundaries of shell-like domains
JF  - New Journal of Physics (NJP)
N2  - We study the probability density function (PDF) of the first-reaction times between a diffusive ligand and a membrane-bound, immobile imperfect target region in a restricted 'onion-shell' geometry bounded by two nested membranes of arbitrary shapes. For such a setting, encountered in diverse molecular signal transduction pathways or in the narrow escape problem with additional steric constraints, we derive an exact spectral form of the PDF, as well as present its approximate form calculated by help of the so-called self-consistent approximation. For a particular case when the nested domains are concentric spheres, we get a fully explicit form of the approximated PDF, assess the accuracy of this approximation, and discuss various facets of the obtained distributions. Our results can be straightforwardly applied to describe the PDF of the terminal reaction event in multi-stage signal transduction processes.
KW  - diffusion
KW  - first-passage time
KW  - first-reaction time
KW  - shell-like geometries
KW  - approximate methods
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ac4282
SN  - 1367-2630
VL  - 2021
SP  - 1
EP  - 23
PB  - IOP Publishing
CY  - London
ET  - 23
ER  -