Brownian motion: a paradigm of soft matter and biological physics

Abstract

This is a pedagogical introduction to Brownian motion on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's 1905 paper on the subject. After briefly reviewing Einstein's work in its contemporary context, we pursue some lines of further developments and applications in soft condensed matter and biology. Over the last century Brownian motion became promoted from an odd curiosity of marginal scientific interest to a guiding theme pervading all of the modern (live) sciences.

30 pages, review

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Stochastic thermodynamics, fluctuation theorems, and molecular machines
• Spectral content of a single non-Brownian trajectory
• Enzyme-enriched condensates show self-propulsion, positioning, and coexistence
• Counting and correcting thermodynamically infeasible flux cycles in genome-scale metabolic networks
• Velocity autocorrelation function of a Brownian particle
• Self-consistent sharp interface theory of active condensate dynamics
• Engineering active motion in quantum matter
• Stochastic resetting in a nonequilibrium environment
• Noise-cancellation algorithm for simulations of Brownian particles
• Externally driven condensates show translation-induced polarization, directed coalescence, and anomalous diffusion in viscoelastic media