Negative autocorrelations of disorder strongly suppress thermally activated particle motion in short-correlated quenched Gaussian disorder potentials

Abstract

We evaluate the mean escape time of overdamped particles over potential barriers in short-correlated quenched Gaussian disorder potentials in one dimension at low temperature. The thermally activated escape is very sensitive to the form of the \emph{tail} of the potential barrier probability distribution. We evaluate this tail by using the optimal fluctuation method. For monotone decreasing autocovariances we reproduce the tail obtained by Lopatin and Vinokur (2001). However, for nonmonotonic autocovariances of the disorder potential we show that the tail changes. It is much higher when the disorder potential exhibits negative autocorrelations, and it is much lower when the autocovariance is nonmonotonic but everywhere positive. This leads to an \emph{exponential} increase or decrease, respectively, of the mean escape time.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• The long reach of DNA sequence heterogeneity in diffusive processes
• Experimental creation and characterization of random potential energy landscapes exploiting speckle patterns
• Persistent Sinai type diffusion in Gaussian random potentials with decaying spatial correlations

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Geometrical optics of large deviations of fractional Brownian motion
• Path integrals for fractional Brownian motion and fractional Gaussian noise
• Caustics in turbulent aerosols form along the Vieillefosse line at weak particle inertia
• Geometrical optics of large deviations of Brownian motion in inhomogeneous media
• Thermally activated particle motion in biased correlated Gaussian disorder potentials
• Full distribution of the ground-state energy of potentials with weak disorder