English

Relaxation of a Colloidal Particle into a Nonequilibrium Steady State

Soft Condensed Matter 2015-05-13 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We study the relaxation of a single colloidal sphere which is periodically driven between two nonequilibrium steady states. Experimentally, this is achieved by driving the particle along a toroidal trap imposed by scanned optical tweezers. We find that the relaxation time after which the probability distributions have been relaxed is identical to that obtained by a steady state measurement. In quantitative agreement with theoretical calculations the relaxation time strongly increases when driving the system further away from thermal equilibrium.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0902.2650,
  title  = {Relaxation of a Colloidal Particle into a Nonequilibrium Steady State},
  author = {Valentin Blickle and Jakob Mehl and Clemens Bechinger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0902.2650},
  year   = {2015}
}