Nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of single molecules and wealth
Abstract:
What’s in common between the position of a molecular motor moving along its track and the content of one’s wallet? Both undergo some sort of (biased) random walk, whose properties depend on random interactions with the environment. In this talk I will discuss two connected problems. The first is concerned with the statistical properties of the paths via which single molecules transition between their distinct states. Protein folding, i.e., the transition between the unfolded (unstructured) and folded (structured) states of a protein is one example; while in transit, the molecule can be thought of as a player in the gambler’s ruin problem, with the unfolded and folded states corresponding to going broke and winning the game (or the other way around). I will show that certain symmetries and inequalities satisfied by the molecular transition paths contain important, experimentally testable information about, e.g., whether or not the molecule’s dynamics can be described as a memoryless random walk. The second problem is concerned with the evolution and distribution of wealth in simple random money/energy exchange games, for which I will show that the famous Pareto distribution of wealth arises naturally as a consequence of time-reversal symmetry breaking; in contrast, time-reversible exchange games, just like random molecular collisions in a gas, lead to Boltzmann statistics.
About the speaker:
Dmitrii E Makarov received a PhD in theoretical physics from the Institute for Chemical Physics (Moscow, Russia) in 1992. Since 2001 he has been on the faculty at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently a full professor. He is also a core faculty at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences. His research interests are in the field of computational and theoretical chemical physics, with current research topics ranging from quantum reaction rate theory to molecular biophysics. Dmitrii E. Makarov’s interests are in the field of theoretical and computational chemical physics (reaction rate theory, predicting kinetics of complex chemical phenomena, mechanochemistry, quantum rate theory), biomolecular folding and dynamics, single-molecule phenomena in biophysics, and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics.
This year we will continue with the new format:
- Onsite on Campus Limpertsberg, where you will have the opportunity to meet the speaker over the lunch. Catering is offered from 12:00 PM to all registered participants (BSC Hall). Please register below for the lunch latest on 28 March 2025. Talk at 1:00 PM in BSC 0.03.
- Online – through Webex – to give you the opportunity to listen to the talk in case you are travelling or cannot make it onsite at Campus Limpertsberg. Here are the details to join the talk online: Meeting number: 2793 212 2693. Password: 5sjMwqSFm83