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 motion, Brownian surfaces are named after 19th-century biologist Robert Brown. Efficient generation of fractional Brownian surfaces poses significant challenges. Since the Brownian surface represents a Gaussian process with a nonstationary covariance function, one can use the Cholesky decomposition method. A more efficient method is Stein's method, which generates an auxiliary stationary Gaussian process using the circulant embedding approach and then adjusts this auxiliary process to obtain the desired nonstationary Gaussian process. The figure below shows three typical realizations of fractional Brownian surfaces for different values of the roughness or Hurst parameter. The Hurst parameter is always between zero and