https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02571-4
Regular Article
Crowding competes with trapping to enhance interfacial diffusion
1
Division of Physical Chemistry, Group for Computational Life Sciences, Institute of RuƉer Bošković, Bijenička c. 54, 10000, Zagreb, Croatia
2
Institute for Theoretical Physics, PULS Group, IZNF, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Cauerstrasse 3, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
d smith@physik.fau.de, asmith@irb.hr
Received:
10
February
2022
Accepted:
1
March
2022
Published online:
17
March
2022
Diffusion of species on biological membranes or materials interfaces is expected to slow down with an increase in their density, but also due to their intermittent binding to functional moieties or surface-defects. These processes, known as crowding and trapping, respectively, occur simultaneously in a broad range of interfacial systems. However their combined effect on the diffusion coefficients was not studied hitherto. Here, we analytically calculate and numerically validate by Monte Carlo simulations an expression for the diffusion coefficient of a two-dimensional lattice gas in a field of immobilized traps. As expected, trapping and crowding both suppress transport but, surprisingly, the diffusion coefficient is non-monotonous. Namely, increasing gas densities increases trap occupancy while crowding is not overpowering, such that the diffusion reaches a maximum. These results should be relevant to interfacial growth phenomena, as discussed in the context of nascent adhesions in cells.
Mislav Cvitković and Dipanwita Ghanti contributed equally to this work.
Mislav Cvitković and Dipanwita Ghanti contributed equally to this work.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02571-4.
© The Author(s) 2022
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
