Paradigm Shift in Diffusion-Mediated Surface Phenomena

Diffusion-mediated surface phenomena are crucial for human life and industry, with examples ranging from oxygen capture by lung alveolar surface to heterogeneous catalysis, gene regulation, membrane permeation, and filtration processes. Their current description via diffusion equations with mixed bo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2020-08, Vol.125 (7), p.1-078102, Article 078102
Main Author: Grebenkov, Denis S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological Physics
Boundary conditions
Catalysis
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
Condensed Matter
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Diffusion
Mathematical Physics
Membranes
Optimization
Particle interactions
Physics
Reaction mechanisms
Reactivity
Statistical analysis
Statistical Mechanics
Surface reactions
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Summary:Diffusion-mediated surface phenomena are crucial for human life and industry, with examples ranging from oxygen capture by lung alveolar surface to heterogeneous catalysis, gene regulation, membrane permeation, and filtration processes. Their current description via diffusion equations with mixed boundary conditions is limited to simple surface reactions with infinite or constant reactivity. In this Letter, we propose a probabilistic approach based on the concept of boundary local time to investigate the intricate dynamics of diffusing particles near a reactive surface. Reformulating surface-particle interactions in terms of stopping conditions, we obtain in a unified way major diffusion-reaction characteristics such as the propagator, the survival probability, the first-passage time distribution, and the reaction rate. This general formalism allows us to describe new surface reaction mechanisms such as for instance surface reactivity depending on the number of encounters with the diffusing particle that can model the effects of catalyst fooling or membrane degradation. The disentanglement of the geometric structure of the medium from surface reactivity opens far-reaching perspectives for modeling, optimization, and control of diffusion-mediated surface phenomena.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.078102