English

Weak disorder strongly improves the selective enhancement of diffusion in a tilted periodic potential

Statistical Mechanics 2009-11-13 v1

Abstract

The diffusion of an overdamped Brownian particle in a tilted periodic potential is known to exhibit a pronounced enhancement over the free thermal diffusion within a small interval of tilt-values. Here we show that weak disorder in the form of small, time-independent deviations from a strictly spatially periodic potential may further boost this diffusion peak by orders of magnitude. Our general theoretical predictions are in excellent agreement with experimental observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0810.1857,
  title  = {Weak disorder strongly improves the selective enhancement of diffusion in a tilted periodic potential},
  author = {Peter Reimann and Ralf Eichhorn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0810.1857},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Phys. Rev. Lett., in press