Recycled Noise Rectification: A Dumb Maxwell's Daemon

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how recycling and feedback of noise in a Brownian system can induce directed motion, acting like a passive Maxwell's daemon, with potential applications in nanodevice design.

Contribution

It introduces a noise recycling mechanism that creates a rectification effect in Brownian motion, functioning as a passive Maxwell's daemon with tunable parameters.

Findings

Recycled noise can induce net current in symmetric systems.

The rectification effect is a resonant nonlinear phenomenon.

Optimal recycling parameters maximize particle transport.

Abstract

The one dimensional motion of a massless Brownian particle on a symmetric periodic substrate can be rectified by re-injecting its driving noise through a realistic recycling procedure. If the recycled noise is multiplicatively coupled to the substrate, the ensuing feed-back system works like a passive Maxwell's daemon, capable of inducing a net current that depends on both the delay and the autocorrelation times of the noise signals. Extensive numerical simulations show that the underlying rectification mechanism is a resonant nonlinear effect: The observed currents can be optimized for an appropriate choice of the recycling parameters with immediate application to the design of nanodevices for particle transport.