title: Brownian needle in dire straits: stochastic motion of a rod in very confined narrow domains.
abstract: We study the mean turnaround time of a Brownian needle in a narrow planar strip. When the needle is only slightly shorter than the width of the strip, the computation becomes a nonstandard narrow escape problem. We develop a boundary layer method, based on a conformal mapping of cusplike narrow straits, to obtain an explicit asymptotic approximation to the mean turnaround time. Our result suggests that two-dimensional domains lying between parallel walls may play a significant role in DNA repair.
authors.affiliation: Ecole Normale Supérieure, Institute for Biology, IBENS, Group of Computational Biology and Applied Mathematics, 46 rue d'Ulm, F-75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Holcman
authors.forename: Z
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Schuss
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D004260:DNA Repair; D004058:Diffusion; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular; D053758:Nanoparticles / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D013269:Stochastic Processes
chemical_list: D004247:DNA