Strong Mobility in Weakly Disordered Systems

Abstract

We study transport of interacting particles in weakly disordered media. Our one-dimensional system includes (i) disorder: the hopping rate governing the movement of a particle between two neighboring lattice sites is inhomogeneous, and (ii) hard core interaction: the maximum occupancy at each site is one particle. We find that over a substantial regime, the root-mean-square displacement of a particle, sigma, grows super-diffusively with time t, sigma ~ (epsilon t)^{2/3}, where epsilon is the disorder strength. Without disorder the particle displacement is sub-diffusive, sigma ~ t^{1/4}, and therefore disorder dramatically enhances particle mobility. We explain this effect using scaling arguments, and verify the theoretical predictions through numerical simulations. Also, the simulations show that disorder generally leads to stronger mobility.

4 pages, 5 figures