Using dice, fuzzy or not, to move molecules

This post has been a long tine coming... I wrote it back in May 2015, and somehow in the middle of things, I forgot to hit "publish." While we have done quite a bit of work with this model since then, maybe you'll still enjoy our crazy analogy to playing dice with particles at the mesoscale...

Some time ago, I published what might seem as yet another paper describing the properties of our model for (coarse-grained) large-scale macromolecules. A critical part of the model is that we roll dice every time these particles collide so as to decide whether they bounce or go through each other. They can overlap, because at intermediate length scales, they don't behave like rocks even if they occupy space. Despite our simple (and dicey) model, in our earlier papers, we showed that our particles give rise to the same structure as the corresponding particles that would interact through typical (so-called soft) interactions. But Einstein's famous quote about God not playing dice with the universe (albeit in a different context) serves as a warning that our particles might not move in analogous ways to those driven by Newton's deterministic laws. In our most recent paper, we confirmed that our particles (if they live in one dimension) do recover deterministic dynamics at sufficiently long (that is, coarse-grained) length scales. That's a baby step towards using our model in human-scale (three) dimensions. So there are more papers to come!

The work was performed (and the paper was written) with my recent Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Galen Craven, and a Research Scientist, Dr. Alex Popov. It's basic research and I'm happy to say that It was supported by the National Science Foundation. The title of the article is "Stochastic dynamics of penetrable rods in one dimension: Entangled dynamics and transport properties," and it was recently published at J. Chem. Phys. 142, 154906 (2015).