Clustering in two models of interacting motors

Abstract

We study a two-species bidirectional exclusion process, and a single species variant, which is motivated by the motion of organelles and vesicles along microtubules. Specifically, we are interested in the clustering of the particles and appearance of a single large cluster as the ratio $Q$ of the translation to switching rates is varied. We find that, although for a finite system, there is a clustering phenomenon in which the probability of finding a single large cluster changes from being negligible to having finite values, the phenomenon shifts to larger $Q$ values as the system size is increased. This suggests that the observed clustering is not a true (nonequilibrium) transition in the thermodynamic sense but rather a finite-size effect.