Statistically Locked-In Transport through Periodic Potential Landscapes

Ajay Gopinathan and David G. Grier

Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 130602 – Published 1 April 2004

Abstract

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.

Received 5 November 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.130602

Authors & Affiliations

Ajay Gopinathan^* and David G. Grier^†

Department of Physics and James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

^*Present address: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, and Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
^†Present address: Department of Physics and Center for Soft Matter Research, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.

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Issue

Vol. 92, Iss. 13 — 2 April 2004

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Physical Review Letters