A mobility based approach to transport in chiral fluids
Abstract
Chiral fluids, for which the mobility tensor has antisymmetric, off-diagonal components, exhibit transport phenomena absent in conventional systems, including interaction-enhanced diffusion and negative mobility. While these effects have been predicted theoretically and observed in simulations, their microscopic origin has remained unclear. Here, we address this question using a mobility-based nonequilibrium approach, analysing the steady-state drift of a tracer driven through an interacting chiral fluid. We show that, under strong chirality, the tracer generates a reversed density wake, in which regions of particle accumulation and depletion are inverted compared to the achiral case. This structural inversion of the wake provides a unified physical mechanism underlying both enhanced diffusion and negative mobility. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these phenomena are robust to changes in the interaction potential, highlighting their generality as a consequence of odd mobility.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.18091,
title = {A mobility based approach to transport in chiral fluids},
author = {Filippo Faedi and Erik Kalz and Ralf Metzler and Abhinav Sharma},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18091},
year = {2026}
}