Brownian ratchet a heat bath in that they undergo random Brownian motion with a mean kinetic energy that is determined by the temperature. The device is imagined as being small enough that the impulse from a single molecular collision can turn the paddle. Although such collisions would tend to turn the rod in either direction with equal probability, the pawl allows the ratchet to rotate in one direction only. The net effect of many such random collisions would seem to be that the ratchet rotates continuously in that direction. The ratchet's motion then can be used to do work on other systems,
Brownian surface Brownian surface A Brownian surface is a fractal surface generated via a fractal elevation function. For instance, in the three-dimensional case, where two variables "X" and "Y" are given as coordinates, the elevation function between any two points ("x", "y") and ("x", "y") can be set to have a mean or expected value that increases as the vector distance between ("x", "y") and ("x", "y"). There are, however, many ways of defining the elevation function. For instance, the fractional Brownian motion variable may be used, or various rotation functions may be used to achieve more natural looking surfaces. As with