Effective Temperature of Red Blood Cell Membrane Fluctuations

Abstract

Biologically driven non-equilibrium fluctuations are often characterized by their non-Gaussianity or by an "effective temperature", which is frequency dependent and higher than the ambient temperature. We address these two measures theoretically by examining a randomly kicked "particle", with a variable number of kicking "motors", and show how these two indicators of non-equilibrium behavior can contradict. Our results are compared with new experiments on shape fluctuations of red-blood cell membranes, and demonstrate how the physical nature of the motors in this system can be revealed using these global measures of non-equilibrium.

5 pages, 4 figures, Supplementary Information at http://www.weizmann.ac.il/~feshokef/rbc.html

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