Directed motion generated by heat bath nonlinearly driven by external noise

Abstract

Based on the system heat bath approach where the bath is nonlinearly modulated by an external Gaussian random force, we propose a new microscopic model to study directed motion in the overdamped limit for a nonequilibrium open system. Making use of the coupling between the heat bath and the external modulation as a small perturbation we construct a Langevin equation with multiplicative noise and space dependent dissipation and the corresponding Fokker-Planck-Smoluchowski equation in the overdamped limit. We examine the thermodynamic consistency condition and explore the possibility of observing a phase induced current as a consequence of state dependent diffusion and, necessarily, nonlinear driving of the heat bath by the external noise.

10 pages, 2 figures, iopart.cls included