Interacting Particles in Disordered Flashing Ratchets

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how quenched disorder affects particle flow in a flashing ratchet system, revealing different behaviors and phase transitions driven by particle density.

Contribution

It introduces a classification of quenched disorder effects and models the system with an effective disordered ASEP to explain observed phenomena.

Findings

Disorder causes strong or weak effects on particle flux.

Density-driven phase transition observed in the system.

Effective disordered ASEP explains the steady state behavior.

Abstract

We study, using Monte Carlo simulations, the steady state properties of a system of particles interacting via hard core exclusion and moving in a discrete flashing disordered ratchet potential. Quenched disorder is introduced by breaking the periodicity of the ratchet potential through changing shape of the potential across randomly chosen but fixed periods. We show that the effects of quenched disorder can be broadly classified as strong or weak with qualitatively different behaviour of the steady state particle flux as a function of overall particle density. We further show that most of the effects including a density driven nonequilibrium phase transition observed can be understood by constructing an effective asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) with quenched disorder in the hop rates.