Giant non-equilibrium fluctuations in diffusion in freely-suspended liquid films

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that non-equilibrium concentration fluctuations during diffusion are significantly amplified in two-dimensional liquid films compared to three-dimensional fluids, with implications for biological membranes.

Contribution

The study extends diffusion fluctuation theory to two-dimensional systems and evaluates the impact of surrounding fluid drag, providing new insights into membrane diffusion phenomena.

Findings

Fluctuation amplitude is much stronger in 2D systems.

Drag effects significantly influence fluctuation dynamics.

The theory aligns with FRAP experimental results.

Abstract

Experimental work has shown that non-equilibrium concentration fluctuations arise during free diffusion in fluids and theoretical analysis has been carried on. The results show that, in usual three-dimensional fluids, the phenomenon is extremely weak, in terms of amplitude of the fluctuations and of corrugation of the diffusion wave fronts. In this paper, we show that the phenomena strongly depends on the dimensionality of the system: by extending the theory to two dimensional systems, we show that the root mean square amplitude of the fluctuations and the wave front corrugation become much stronger. We also present an evaluation of the Hausdorf dimension of the expected fluctuations. Experimentally, two-dimensional liquid systems can be realised as freely suspended liquid films; experiments and theoretical works on diffusion in such systems showed that the dynamics is deeply affected by the viscous drag exerted by the fluids (e.g. air) surrounding the film. We provide an evaluation of the drag on the fluctuations. In particular, we study the case of a concentration profile that is initially gaussian: it can be directly compared with the results from a fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) experiment. We propose that this theory and the related experiments can be relevant for describing the diffusion along the cellular membranes of living organisms.