Escape and reentry of a Brownian particle through a hole in a cavity

Abstract

We show that the kinetics of diffusive escape from a cavity through a small hole can be described, to a sufficient degree of accuracy, by a formal kinetic scheme for reversible dissociation of a spherical binding site with appropriately defined effective association and dissociation rate constants. At short times, the population of the cavity decays exponentially, while at long times a crossover to the inverse power law behavior is observed. These simple predictions are in excellent agreement with the results of Brownian dynamics simulations.