Narrow Escape Visualization

The Narrow Escape Problem is a bio physics problem which attempts to estimate how long it takes for a particle moving under Brownian motion to escape from a container with solid walls, where part of the wall is open.

Recently we published a software library for building narrow escape simulations. We also used this to discuss its use in determining the escape time for small molecules from plant cells.

I’ve recently been working with plotly to create interactive plots. With plotly I put together a little example of our simulation software which, I think, nicely explains the concept.

Below you can see our container cell in silvery-gray, a blue dot represents the part of the container which is free to escape through. By moving the slider you can see the random-walk path that the particle takes until it finally reaches the blue escape point.

(I also wrote this as I wanted an excuse to test out my new blog and how it handles these plotly graphs!)