Statistical physics of inhomogeneous transport: Unification of diffusion laws and inference from first-passage statistics

Understand

Characterization of composite materials, whose properties vary in space over microscopic scales, has become a problem of broad interdisciplinary interest.

• In particular, estimation of the inhomogeneous transport coefficients, e.g.
• the diffusion coefficient or the heat conductivity which shape important processes in biology and engineering, is a challenging task.
• The analysis of such systems is further complicated, because two alternative formulations of the inhomogeneous transport equations exist in the literature -- the Smoluchowski and Fokker-Planck equations, which are also related to the so-called Ito-Stratonovich dilemma.