Professor Ken A. Dill
Chemistry and Physics
Stony Brook University
New York, NY

Monday, February 28, 2011
3:00 pm (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

Abstract: At the macroscopic level, our dynamical laws include Fick’s law of diffusion, Fourier’s law of heat flow, and mass-action laws of chemical kinetics. But in systems having only a few particles, such as in biological cells or other nanoscale systems, the dynamical fluctuations can often be as important as the average fluxes described by those laws. We are exploring a nonequilibrium statistical mechanical principle called Maximum Caliber for modeling small-numbers dynamics. I will also describe experimental applications to few-particle diffusion, single-particle two-state processes, and to an engineered biological gene toggle switch.