Expediting molecular transport through geometric channels

What is it about?

What is the optimal path using which particles can transport through confined geometries of various topographies? Can these paths be engineered in a way so that the transport becomes faster? This work shows that by invoking an intermittent dynamics namely resetting, one can expedite molecular transport through geometric channels of arbitrary size and shape. More specifically, resetting stops the motion of a molecule and compels it to restart its dynamics from its initial configuration intermittently according to an external timer that is controlled externally. While natural intuitions suggest that such mechanism can only hinder the transport, this work indeed shows, on contrary, that resetting can shorten the transport significantly. Such an intriguing combination of these two phenomena—resetting and geometric confinement—can be a reasonable attempt to delve deeper into the understanding of Michaelis–Menten reaction when the reaction site is hidden in a protein membrane channel or protein cavity.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The study of transition paths remains of paramount importance for the particle transport through confined geometries containing narrow openings and bottlenecks. A pertinent question therein is how to design practical ways to speed-up the transport process. Our work proposes one such dynamical maneuver that can lead to an accelerated transport. This has a broad interest to the chemical physics community as it provides new insights into the fundamentals of transition path statistics towards a facilitated transport – thus also has potential appeal to experimental communities who investigate ion/metabolite transport inside the channels.