Statistically locked-in transport through periodic potential landscapes.
Classical particles driven through periodically modulated potential energy landscapes are predicted to follow a devil's staircase hierarchy of commensurate trajectories depending on the orientation of the driving force. Recent experiments on colloidal spheres flowing through arrays of optical traps do indeed reveal such a hierarchy, but not with the predicted structure. The microscopic trajectories, moreover, appear to be random, with commensurability emerging only in a statistical sense. We introduce an idealized model for periodically modulated transport in the presence of randomness that captures both the structure and statistics of such statistically locked-in states.
Gopinathan
Ajay
A
Department of Physics and James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Grier
David G
DG