published by the The University of Florida

This manual describes an advanced undergraduate laboratory experiment in the study of Brownian motion.  The manual explains the statistical physics of Brownian motion in detail and then describes the measurement of diffusion coefficients for fluorescent latex beads in water.  The analogy between trajectories of a Brownian particle and the random coiled configurations of biomolecules is discussed.  This analogy leads to a rough prediction for the rate of diffusion of a DNA molecule in water. Accordingly the experiment includes measurement of the Brownian motion of fluorescently labelled DNA fragments.

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Last Modified December 28, 2015

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