Microscopic theory for negative differential mobility in crowded environments

Abstract

We study the behavior of the stationary velocity of a driven particle in an environment of mobile hard-core obstacles. Based on a lattice gas model, we demonstrate analytically that the drift velocity can exhibit a nonmonotonic dependence on the applied force, and show quantitatively that such negative differential mobility (NDM), observed in various physical contexts, is controlled by both the density and diffusion time scale of obstacles. Our study unifies recent numerical and analytical results obtained in specific regimes, and makes it possible to determine analytically the region of the full parameter space where NDM occurs. These results suggest that NDM could be a generic feature of biased (or active) transport in crowded environments.

5 pages, 2 figures + supplemental material

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• Nonlinear response and fluctuation dissipation relations
• Negative differential conductivity in far-from-equilibrium quantum spin chains
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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Nonlinear response of inertial tracers in steady laminar flows: differential and absolute negative mobility
• Time-Dependent Fluctuations and Superdiffusivity in the Driven Lattice Lorentz Gas
• Anomalous force-velocity relation of driven inertial tracers in steady laminar flows
• Self-propulsion against a moving membrane: enhanced accumulation and drag force
• Negative response to an excessive bias by a mixed population of voters
• Tracer particle diffusion in a system with hardcore interacting particles