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

@ribelousov, Ali Hassanali, @edgarroldankb, Phys. Rev. E 106 (2022).

Physical matter often diffuses with different speeds across various regions of a complex system. How do the thermodynamic laws and statistical physics describe such space-dependent transport processes? A key to the theory has been found in the first-passage problems, which unveil the space-dependent diffusivity of water near soft-matter phase boundaries.