Aging in the transport on the corrugated ratchet potential

TL;DR

This paper explores aging phenomena in the collective motion of Brownian particles within a disordered ratchet potential, revealing super-diffusive behavior and weak ergodicity breaking over long timescales.

Contribution

It demonstrates the emergence of aging-like behavior in a Brownian ratchet system with quenched disorder, linking super-diffusion to ergodicity breaking.

Findings

Super-diffusive transport observed in the system.

Long time trapping leads to weak ergodicity breaking.

Aging behavior analogous to glassy systems emerges.

Abstract

Under rapid undercooling, glass forming liquids freeze in an amorphous state that can equilibrate only on enormously long time-scales, This is the characteristic sign of aging, which has been observed in a wide range of systems. Brownian ratchet is a widely studied system that exhibits many types of anomalous dynamical behavior. We have investigated the possibility of aging in the collective motion of Brownian particles in a periodic ratchet potential with quenched disorder. We find that when a slowly growing fraction of particles are trapped for long time, the collective movement tends to become super-diffusive. The super-diffusive transport weakly breaks the ergodicity and the time to cover the whole phase space become enormously long and reminiscent of aging behavior.