Drift induced by dissipation

Abstract

Active particles have become a subject of intense interest across several disciplines from animal behavior to granular physics. Usually the models of such particles contain an explicit internal driving. Here we propose a model with implicit driving in the sense that the behavior of our particle is fully dissipative at zero temperature but becomes active in the presence of seemingly innocent equilibrium fluctuations. The mechanism of activity is related to the breaking of the gradient structure in the chemo-mechanical coupling. We show that the thermodynamics of such active particles depends crucially on inertia and cannot be correctly captured in the standard Smoluchowski limit. To deal with stall conditions, we generalize the definition of Stokes efficiency, assessing the quality of active force generation. We propose a simple realization of the model in terms of an electric circuit capable of turning fluctuations into a directed current without an explicit source of voltage.