Brownian ratchets: How stronger thermal noise can reduce diffusion

Abstract

We study diffusion properties of an inertial Brownian motor moving on a ratchet substrate, i.e. a periodic structure with broken reflection symmetry. The motor is driven by an unbiased time-periodic symmetric force which takes the system out of thermal equilibrium. For selected parameter sets, the system is in a non-chaotic regime in which we can identify a non-monotonic dependence of the diffusion coefficient on temperature: for low temperature, it initially increases as temperature grows, passes through its local maximum, next starts to diminish reaching its local minimum and finally it monotonically increases in accordance with the Einstein linear relation. Particularly interesting is the temperature interval in which diffusion is suppressed by thermal noise and we explain this effect in terms of transition rates of a three-state stochastic model.