Part I: The Theory of Brownian Vacancy Driven Walk

We analyze the lattice walk performed by a tagged member of an infinite 'sea' of particles filling a d-dimensional lattice, in the presence of a single vacancy. The vacancy is allowed to be occupied with probability 1/2d by any of its 2d nearest neighbors, so that it executes a Brownian walk. Particle-particle exchange is forbidden; the only interaction between them being hard core exclusion. Thus, the tagged particle, differing from the others only by its tag, moves only when it exchanges places with the hole. In this sense, it is a random walk "driven" by the Brownian vacancy. The probability distributions for its displacement and for the number of steps taken, after n-steps of the vacancy, are derived. Neither is a Gaussian! We also show that the only nontrivial dimension where the walk is recurrent is d=2. As an application, we compute the expected energy shift caused by a Brownian vacancy in a model for an extreme anisotropic binary alloy. In the last chapter we present a Monte-Carlo study and a mean-field analysis for interface erosion caused by mobile vacancies.

Part II: One-Dimensional Periodic Hopping Models with Broken Translational Invariance.Case of a Mobile Directional Impurity

We study a random walk on a one-dimensional periodic lattice with arbitrary hopping rates. Further, the lattice contains a single mobile, directional impurity (defect bond), across which the rate is fixed at another arbitrary value. Due to the defect, translational invariance is broken, even if all other rates are identical. The structure of Master equations lead naturally to the introduction of a new entity, associated with the walker-impurity pair which we call the quasi-walker. Analytic solution for the distributions in the steady state limit is obtained. The velocities and diffusion constants for both the random walker and impurity are given, being simply related to that of the quasi-particle through physically meaningful equations. As an application, we extend the Duke-Rubinstein reputation model of gel electrophoresis to include polymers with impurities and give the exact distribution of the steady state.