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 bridge Brownian bridge A Brownian bridge is a continuous-time stochastic process "B"("t") whose probability distribution is the conditional probability distribution of a Wiener process "W"("t") (a mathematical model of Brownian motion) subject to the condition (when standardized) that "W"(T) = 0, so that the process is pinned at the origin at both "t=0" and "t=T". More precisely: The expected value of the bridge is zero, with variance formula_2, implying that the most uncertainty is in the middle of the bridge, with zero uncertainty at the nodes. The covariance of "B"("s") and "B"("t") is "s"(T − "t")/T if "s" < "t". The