Related papers: Botanical Ratchets
We investigate the performance of an inertial frictional ratchet in a sinusoidal potential driven by a sinusoidal external field. The dependence of the performance on the parameters of the sinusoidally varying friction, such as the mean…
In this work, the ratchet dynamics of Brownian particles driven by an external sinusoidal (harmonic) force is investigated. The gating ratchet effect is observed when another harmonic is used to modulate the spatially symmetric potential in…
Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example,…
A simple model for a granular ratchet corresponding to a single grain bouncing off a vertically vibrating sawtooth-like base is studied. Depending on the vibration strength, the sawtooth roughness and the restitution coefficient, horizontal…
Aeolian sand beds exhibit regular patterns of ripples resulting from the interaction between topography and sediment transport. Their characteristics have been so far related to reptation transport caused by the impacts on the ground of…
Several species of plants have raindrop-sized flowers that catch raindrops opportunistically in order to spread their 0.3-mm seeds distances of over 1 m. In the following fluid dynamics video, we show examples of these plants and some of…
It has been shown that the combination of a broken spatial symmetry in the potential (or ratchet potential) and time correlations in the driving are crucial, and enough to allow transformation of the fluctuations into work. The required…
We consider the orbital effect of an in-plane magnetic field on electrons in bilayer graphene, deriving linear-in-field contributions to the low-energy Hamiltonian arising from the presence of either skew interlayer coupling or interlayer…
Experiments show that the movement of eukaryotic cells is regulated by a process of phase separation of two competing enzymes on the cell membrane, that effectively amplifies shallow external gradients of chemical attractant. Notably, the…
Soft and frangible materials that remodel under flow can give rise to branched patterns shaped by material properties, boundary conditions, and the time scales of forcing. We present a general theoretical framework for emergent branching in…
In this work we propose a ratchet effect which provides a general means of performing clocked logic operations on discrete particles, such as single electrons or vortices. The states are propagated through the device by the use of an…
In this paper we present a combinatorial optimisation view on the routing problem for connectionless packet networks by using the metaphor of a landscape. We examine the main properties of the routing landscapes as we define them and how…
We consider a one-dimensional mono-atomic lattice with random perturbations of masses spread over a finite number of particles. Assuming Newtonian dynamics and linear nearest-neighbour interactions and allowing for a provision of pinning…
Thermal ratchets can extract useful work from random fluctuations. This is common in the molecular scale, such as motor proteins, and has also been used to achieve directional transport in microfluidic devices. In this work, we use the…
Geometrical properties of landscapes result from the geological processes that have acted through time. The quantitative analysis of natural relief represents an objective form of aiding in the visual interpretation of landscapes, as…
Reinforced elastic sheets surround us in daily life, from concrete shell buildings to biological structures such as the arthropod exoskeleton or the venation network of dicotyledonous plant leaves. Natural structures are often highly…
We study theoretically the spatial distribution of the polarizations in the array of resonant electromagnetic dipole emitters coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide. The ratchet effect manifests itself in the spatial asymmetry of the…
We analyze a model for a walker moving on a ratchet potential. This model is motivated by the properties of transport of motor proteins, like kinesin and myosin. The walker consists of two feet represented as two particles coupled…
The energetic efficiency of an overdamped Brownian particle in a saw tooth potential in the presence of time asymmetric forcing is studied in the adiabatic limit. An error made in the earlier work on the same problem in literature is…
The muscle contraction, operation of ATP synthase, maintaining the shape of a cell are believed to be secured by motor proteins, which can be modelled using the Brownian ratchet mechanism. We consider the randomly flashing ratchet model of…