THEORETICAL STUDIES OF DYNAMICAL PROCESSES IN CHEMICAL PHYSICS AND BIOPHYSICS

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The general focus of research has been on rate processes in disordered systems. One investigation dealt with diffusion in a disordered medium, and in particular with the effects of time- and space-dependent fluctuations in the diffusion coefficient. Ibis is potentially useful in understanding chemical kinetics in biochemical processes in cells. In a second investigation, a new treatment has been made of Berg and Purcell's theory of diffusion controlled ligand binding to receptors randomly distributed on the surface of a cell. Aside from improving on our understanding of their theory, the new treatment makes a modest improvement on its accuracy. In a third area, a major review has been written about theoretical methods that have been invented to treat kinetic processes where rate constants can fluctuate in time (dynamical disorder). Since there are many areas of chemical physics and biophysics in which dynamical disorder is important (e.g. protein dynamics or fluorescence depolarization), a unified treatment of the various methods that have been proposed is expected to be generally useful.