Physics (Internal)

Adsorption-desorption kinetics of soft particles and application to chromatin assembly

This event is part of the Condensed Matter Theory Seminar Series.

Abstract: Adsorption-desorption processes are widespread in physics and biology. The 1D case for hard-exclusive particles has been studied extensively and exhibits transient “jamming” followed by extremely slow equilibration. However, in many realistic applications particles are somewhat compressible. We show that this profoundly alters the kinetics: the “jamming” plateau is replaced by a “cramming” phase, and the subsequent relaxation is very fast and can even be non-monotonic. As a specific example we consider the assembly kinetics of nucleosomes on eukaryotic DNA. This biological system also involves the physics of disordered systems and glassy dynamics.