Probing Diffusive Dynamics of Natural Tubule Nanoclays with Machine Learning

Reproducibility of the experimental results and object of study itself is one of the basic principles in science. But what if the object characterized by technologically important properties is natural and cannot be artificially reproduced one-to-one in the laboratory? The situation becomes even more complicated when we are interested in exploring stochastic properties of a natural system and only a limited set of noisy experimental data is available. In this paper we address these problems by exploring diffusive motion of some natural clays, halloysite and sepiolite, in a liquid environment. By using a combination of dark-field microscopy and machine learning algorithms, a quantitative theoretical characterization of the nanotubes' rotational diffusive dynamics is performed. Scanning the experimental video with the gradient boosting tree method, we can trace time dependence of the diffusion coefficient and probe different regimes of nonequilibrium rotational dynamics that are due to contacts with surfaces and other experimental imperfections. The method we propose is of general nature and can be applied to explore diffusive dynamics of various biological systems in real time.