Intermittency of Single Molecule Reaction Dynamics in Fluctuating Environments

Abstract

Individual activated events in slowly fluctuating environments are now accessible to study by single molecule spectroscopies. The statistics of such events should exhibit intermittency and will not always obey the Poisson law. For short times, the high order moments are of the corresponding power of the average survival probability. For long times, the high order moments decay much more slowly than the Poisson statistics indicate. A simple example illustrates the ideas when both the environmental variables relax exponentially or follow a stretched exponential law as in glasses or biomolecules.