Brownian Motion 2025 Workshop : Friend and Foe

From June 16th to 18th, 2025

Join us in 2025 in Switzerland on the 120th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s paper on Brownian motion, where he proposed a formula for the mean-square displacement of translational motion of a particle immersed in a fluid with the background Newtonian spacetime, which led to experiments proving the existence of atoms.

Significant increase in position sensitivity of Brownian particle in experiments was made possible by invention of optical trapping and accompanying interferometry. In order to gauge the current scientific progress, we pose three mutually connected questions:

• What kind of instrument one must develop to reach higher position sensitivity?

• What kind of physical phenomena can one discover with higher position sensitivities?

• What kind of physical phenomena remain unexplored at currently available resolution?

These questions can be asked simultaneously for high vacuum, gases, liquids, biological matter (viscoelastic media, active matter and single-molecule experiments) and quantum fluids.

There is no laboratory that performs experiments in all of them and thus the workshop would foster interaction between laboratories that don’t usually interact.

In some cases, motion of a Brownian particle is explored for its own sake, whereas in others fluctuations of the Brownian particle have to be removed, and hence Brownian motion can be a friend or a foe.

Join us for this exciting event and register now !


Organizing committee

Louisiane Devaud

Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETHZ

László Forró

Professor of Physics of Complex Quantum Matter and Director of the Stavropoulos Center for Complex Quantum Matter, the University of Notre Dame

Lukas Novotny

Full Professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETHZ

Aleksandra Radenović

Full Professor at the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology at EPFL

Mark Raizen

Professor at the Department of Physics and Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin

Wayne Yang

SNSF Ambizione group leader, EPFL

They support this event

Contact

For any question, please contact us at : brownianmotion2025@epfl.ch