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Publications in Scientific Journals:

G. Schütz, J. Huppa:
"How drag sharpens a T cellīs view on antigen";
PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116 (2019), 16669 - 16671.



English abstract:
How about a Gedankenexperiment (German for thought
experiment)? Let us consider a surface which is sticky,
yet to an unknown degree. To determine stickiness we
may do the following (experimental strategy 1): We
place an object onto the surface, turn the surface upside
down, and measure the time until the object detaches
under its own weight. While strategy 1 has its
merits, it also comes with 2 major drawbacks: First, the
rupture process cannot be accelerated. If the bonds
happen to be rather stable, detachment may take
some time. Second, the information revealed by a
single experiment is rather limited: By chance, rupture
may happen immediately or may take considerable
time. To arrive at a robust estimate of the mean time
required for detachment, we would have to record the
duration of many rupture processes.