Weak disorder strongly improves the selective enhancement of diffusion in a tilted periodic potential

Abstract

The diffusion of an overdamped Brownian particle in a tilted periodic potential is known to exhibit a pronounced enhancement over the free thermal diffusion within a small interval of tilt-values. Here we show that weak disorder in the form of small, time-independent deviations from a strictly spatially periodic potential may further boost this diffusion peak by orders of magnitude. Our general theoretical predictions are in excellent agreement with experimental observations.

Phys. Rev. Lett., in press

References in corpus (2)

• Characterizing Potentials by a Generalized Boltzmann Factor
• Single File Diffusion enhancement in a fluctuating modulated 1D channel