Observation-Time-Induced Crossover in Driven Anomalous Transport

TL;DR

This paper explores how weak forces influence fluctuations in anomalous transport within heterogeneous media, revealing a time-dependent crossover in the response that depends on observation time and disorder.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of an observation-time-induced crossover in driven anomalous transport, highlighting how fluctuations reveal weak forces over time in heterogeneous systems.

Findings

Variance initially follows unbiased scaling at short times.

A crossover to force-dominated behavior occurs at longer times.

Quenched disorder lowers the detection threshold for forces.

Abstract

We investigate how a weak constant force becomes detectable through fluctuations in anomalous transport in strongly heterogeneous media. Rather than focusing on the mean drift, we show that the key signature of the force appears in the variance of the particle displacement. As representative models, we study a biased continuous-time random walk (CTRW) with nearest-neighbor jumps and a biased quenched trap model (QTM) with a power-law waiting-time tail. By analysing the force dependence of the displacement variance, we quantify how fluctuations respond to weak driving. We find that for $\alpha<2$, the response exhibits an observation-time-induced crossover: at fixed bias, the variance initially follows its unbiased scaling and only at later times crosses over to a force-dominated nonequilibrium regime. Equivalently, at fixed observation time $t$, there exists a threshold bias $\varepsilon_c(t)$ separating an apparently equilibrium-like regime from a detectable nonequilibrium response. This threshold decreases with increasing $t$, implying that weaker forces become observable over longer measurement windows. Quenched disorder further lowers the detection threshold compared with CTRW, and the crossover reflects a competition between the finite observation time and the intrinsic relaxation time of the driven heterogeneous system.