Nonergodic subdiffusion from transient interactions with heterogeneous partners

Spatiotemporal disorder has been recently associated to the occurrence of anomalous nonergodic diffusion of molecular components in biological systems, but the underlying microscopic mechanism is still unclear. We introduce a model in which a particle performs continuous Brownian motion with changes of diffusion coefficients induced by transient molecular interactions with diffusive binding partners. In spite of the exponential distribution of waiting times, the model shows subdiffusion and nonergodicity similar to the heavy-tailed continuous time random walk. The dependence of these properties on the density of binding partners is analyzed and discussed. Our work provides an experimentally testable microscopic model to investigate the nature of nonergodicity in disordered media.