Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mphil-in-micro-and-nanotechnology-enterprise-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2021/paper-2/section-b/22/ii/solution

For a no-slip spherical particle in a Newtonian fluid at low Reynolds number, Stokes law gives . The fluctuation-dissipation theorem then gives the Stokes–Einstein relation . Using the conventional radial Brownian displacement in three dimensions,
Here is the Boltzmann constant, absolute temperature, dynamic viscosity, particle radius and elapsed time. Larger thermal forcing raises diffusion; larger viscous drag reduces it. The formula requires times long relative to momentum relaxation and neglects walls, interactions and external drift.
The word “average” needs a statistic: the vector mean is zero, while the mean radial displacement for Gaussian three-dimensional diffusion is , not . Both scale as . Neither is the total length of a microscopic random path.

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