Weak disorder strongly improves the selective enhancement of diffusion in a tilted periodic potential

Abstract

The diffusion of an overdamped Brownian particle in a tilted periodic potential is known to exhibit a pronounced enhancement over the free thermal diffusion within a small interval of tilt-values. Here we show that weak disorder in the form of small, time-independent deviations from a strictly spatially periodic potential may further boost this diffusion peak by orders of magnitude. Our general theoretical predictions are in excellent agreement with experimental observations.