Boundary conditions of normal and anomalous diffusion from thermal equilibrium.

Infiltration of diffusing particles from one material to another, where the diffusion mechanism is either normal or anomalous, is a widely observed phenomenon. Starting with an underlying continuous-time random-walk model, we derive the boundary conditions for the diffusion equations describing this problem. We discuss a simple method showing how the boundary conditions can be determined from equilibrium experiments. When the diffusion processes are close to thermal equilibrium, the boundary conditions are determined by a thermal Boltzmann factor, which in turn controls the solution of the problem.