Title
Boundary Conditions and Trajectories of Diffusion Processes
Mark F. Schumaker
Department of Mathematics
Washington State University
Thursday, January 23, 2003
4:10 p.m. Neil Hall 5 W
Refreshments at 3:30 p.m. Neill 216 Hacker Reading Lounge.
Department of Mathematics
Abstract
The pore of the ion channel gramicidin has the dimensions of approximately
10 water molecules in single file. When certain positively charged
ions occupy the pore, water molecules reorient so as to prevent additional
ions from entering. This "single-ion constraint" can be modeled mathematically
by boundary conditions involving the integral of the ion probability density
within the pore. These boundary conditions are constructed by taking
the diffusion limit of a random walk. The construction also enables
us to visualize particle trajectories associated with the boundary conditions.
By taking limits of sums of single-particle processes, we can also construct
trajectories associated with more familiar boundary conditions for the diffusion
equation. Sample trajectories underlying four different classes of
boundary conditions will be shown.