Effective Perrin theory for the anisotropic diffusion of a strongly hindered rod

Slender rods in concentrated suspensions constitute strongly interacting systems with rich dynamics: transport slows down drastically and the anisotropy of the motion becomes arbitrarily large. We develop a mesoscopic description of the dynamics down to the length scale of the interparticle distance. Our theory is based on the exact solution of the Smoluchowski-Perrin equation; it is in quantitative agreement with extensive Brownian dynamics simulations in the dense regime. In particular, we show that the tube confinementis characterised by a power law decay of the intermediate scattering function with exponent 1/2. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2009