Recycled Noise Rectification: A Dumb Maxwell's Daemon

Abstract

The one dimensional motion of a massless Brownian particle on a symmetric periodic substrate can be rectified by re-injecting its driving noise through a realistic recycling procedure. If the recycled noise is multiplicatively coupled to the substrate, the ensuing feed-back system works like a passive Maxwell's daemon, capable of inducing a net current that depends on both the delay and the autocorrelation times of the noise signals. Extensive numerical simulations show that the underlying rectification mechanism is a resonant nonlinear effect: The observed currents can be optimized for an appropriate choice of the recycling parameters with immediate application to the design of nanodevices for particle transport.