Thermal effects on chaotic directed transport

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal environments influence chaotic ratchet systems, revealing that temperature effects on current enhancement are system-specific and drawing parallels between thermal noise and quantum effects, with implications for cold atom experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of thermal effects on chaotic directed transport using the Lindblad equation, highlighting the non-universal nature of temperature influences and the analogy with quantum size effects.

Findings

Temperature effects on current enhancement vary with system properties.

An analogy exists between thermal noise and finite quantum size effects.

Results suggest potential for experimental testing in cold atom setups.

Abstract

We study a chaotic ratchet system under the influence of a thermal environment. By direct integration of the Lindblad equation we are able to analyze its behavior for a wide range of couplings with the environment, and for different finite temperatures. We observe that the enhancement of the classical and quantum currents due to temperature depend strongly on the specific properties of the system. This makes difficult to extract universal behaviors. We have also found that there is an analogy between the effects of the classical thermal noise and those of the finite $\hbar$ size. These results open many possibilities for their testing and implementation in kicked BECs and cold atoms experiments.