Brownian motion with adhesion: harmonic oscillator with fluctuating mass

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2010 May;81(5 Pt 1):051139. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.81.051139. Epub 2010 May 28.

Abstract

In contrast to the cases usually studied of a harmonic oscillator subject to a random force (Brownian motion) or having random frequency or random damping, we consider a random mass which corresponds to an oscillator for which the particles of the surrounding medium adhere to it for some (random) time after the collision, thereby changing the oscillator mass. This model, which describes Brownian motion with adhesion, can be useful for the analysis of chemical and biological solutions as well as nanotechnological devices. We consider dichotomous noise and its limiting case, white noise.