Designing nanomachines: A theoretical and computational approach

Artificial nano-machines operate within environments where the competition of the stochastic and the deterministic part of the motion defines the conditions of their functioning. As their nature counterparts, bio-motors that function mainly inside a cell, man made machines operate far from equilibrium and usually on constant temperature conditions. Given this and taking a Markovian stochastic model as the initial seed, the evolution of the system may be described both in continuous and discrete space, while mean averaged time depended properties can be given as function of the dynamic characteristics of the system, positions and intensities of interaction potentials. Both the dynamic characteristics of a motor as well as their use for designing a molecular motor that shall achieve the desired directional motion are discussed in this review. Copyright © 2010 American Scientific Publishers à All rights reserved.