Inducing oscillations of trapped particles in a near-critical Gaussian field

Abstract

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of two particles confined in two spatially separated harmonic potentials and linearly coupled to the same thermally fluctuating scalar field, a cartoon for optically trapped colloids in contact with a medium close to a continuous phase transition. When an external periodic driving is applied to one of these particles, a nonequilibrium periodic state is eventually reached in which their motion synchronizes thanks to the field-mediated effective interaction, a phenomenon already observed in experiments. We fully characterize the nonlinear response of the second particle as a function of the driving frequency, and in particular far from the adiabatic regime in which the field can be assumed to relax instantaneously. We compare the perturbative, analytic solution to its adiabatic approximation, thus determining the limits of validity of the latter, and we qualitatively test our predictions against numerical simulations.

33 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (8)

• The Casimir effect: from quantum to critical fluctuations
• Symmetries of generating functionals of Langevin processes with colored multiplicative noise
• Relaxation phenomena at criticality
• Energy transfer between colloids via critical interactions
• Transient Casimir forces from quenches in thermal and active matter
• Dynamics of a colloidal particle coupled to a Gaussian field: from a confinement-dependent to a non-linear memory
• Tracer particle in a confined correlated medium: an adiabatic elimination method
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Memory-induced oscillations of a driven particle in a dissipative correlated medium
• Stochastic thermodynamics of a probe in a fluctuating correlated field
• Tracer particle in a confined correlated medium: an adiabatic elimination method
• Non-Gaussian fluctuations of a probe coupled to a Gaussian field
• Structure and dynamics of a Rouse polymer in a fluctuating correlated medium
• Universal scale-free decay of tracer-bath correlations in $d$-dimensional interacting particle systems
• Recoil of a driven tracer in a correlated medium
• Dynamics of soft interacting particles on a comb