Thermal noise can facilitate energy transformation in the presence of entropic barriers

Abstract

Efficiency of a Brownian particle moving along the axis of a three-dimensional asymmetric periodic channel is investigated in the presence of a symmetric unbiased force and a load. Reduction of the spatial dimensionality from two or three physical dimensions to an effective one-dimensional system entails the appearance of entropic barriers and an effective diffusion coefficient. The energetics in the presence of entropic barriers exhibits peculiar behavior which is different from that occurring through energy barriers. We found that even on the quasistatic limit there is a regime where the efficiency can be a peaked function of temperature, which indicates that thermal noise can facilitate energy transformation, contrary to the case of energy barriers. The appearance of entropic barriers may induce optimized efficiency at a finite temperature.