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Published on: February 5, 2017
Statistical mechanics of passive Brownian particles in a fluctuating harmonic trap
1Department of Chemistry, <a href="https://ror.org/05510vn56">Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María</a>, Campus San Joaquin, 8940897 Santiago, Chile.
Abstract:
We consider passive Brownian particles trapped in an "imperfect" harmonic trap. The trap is imperfect because it is randomly turned off and on, and as a result particles fail to equilibrate. Another way to think about this is to say that a harmonic trap is time dependent on account of its strength evolving stochastically in time. Particles in such a system are passive and activity arises through external control of a trapping potential, thus, no internal energy is used to power particle motion. A stationary Fokker-Planck equation of this system can be represented as a third-order differential equation, and its solution, a stationary distribution, can be represented as a superposition of Gaussian distributions for different strengths of a harmonic trap. This permits us to interpret a stationary system as a system in equilibrium with quenched disorder.
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