ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Optimizing Brownian escape rates by potential shaping.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Experimentally achieving minimal dissipation via thermodynamically optimal transport.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Optofluidic Tweezers: Efficient and Versatile Micro/Nano-Manipulation Tools.Micromachines · 2023Review
- Inferring potential landscapes from noisy trajectories of particles within an optical feedback trap.iScience · 2022Article
- Maximizing power and velocity of an information engine.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Localized potential well vs binding site: Mapping solute dynamics in a membrane channel onto one-dimensional description.The Journal of chemical physics · 2021Article
- Exponentially faster cooling in a colloidal system.Nature · 2020Article
- Enhancing transport by shaping barriers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Brownian escape is key to a wealth of physico-chemical processes, including polymer folding and information storage. The frequency of thermally activated energy barrier crossings is assumed to generally decrease exponentially with increasing barrier height. Here, we show experimentally that higher, fine-tuned barrier profiles result in significantly enhanced escape rates, in breach of the intuition relying on the above scaling law, and address in theory the corresponding conditions for maximum speed-up. Importantly, our barriers end on the same energy on which they start. For overdamped dynamics, the achievable boost of escape rates is, in principle, unbounded so that the barrier optimization has to be regularized. We derive optimal profiles under 2 different regularizations and uncover the efficiency of N-shaped barriers. We then demonstrate the viability of such a potential in automated microfluidic Brownian dynamics experiments using holographic optical tweezers and achieve a doubling of escape rates compared to unhindered Brownian motion. Finally, we show that this escape rate boost extends into the low-friction inertial regime.
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