Demonstration of the existence of biased transportation in the asymmetric nanoscale systems induced by thermal noise from a simple mathematics perspective

Abstract

The existence of net flux across the nanochannels under the asymmetrical static electric fields obtained at room temperature from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations [Nat. Nanotechnol. 2, 709 (2007); Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 064502 (2008)] has been extensively queried on whether the second law of the thermodynamics holds, and whether the observations result from the numerical artifacts. Here we use a simple mathematics to demonstrate the existence of biased-directional transportation (net flux across the channel) in those asymmetrical nanoscale systems at room temperature, at least in the MD simulations. We find that the key to the existence of biased-directional transportation is that the thermal noise is not white anymore at nanoscale; it includes the color noise with an autocorrelation time length (for MD simulation, this length is of ~10 ps).