Artificial Brownian motors: Controlling transport on the nanoscale

By P. Hänggi, Fabio Marchesoni. 2008

1,168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In systems possessing spatial or dynamical symmetry breaking, Brownian motion combined with unbiased external input signals, deterministic and random alike, can assist directed motion of particles at submicron scales. In such cases, one speaks of ``Brownian motors.'' In this review the constructive role of Brownian motion is exemplified for various physical and technological setups, which are inspired by the cellular molecular machinery: the working principles and characteristics of stylized devices are discussed to show how fluctuations, either thermal or extrinsic, can be used to control diffusive particle transport. Recent experimental demonstrations of this concept are surveyed with particular attention to transport in artificial, i.e., nonbiological, nanopores, lithographic tracks, and optical traps, where single-particle currents were first measured. Much emphasis is given to two- and three-dimensional devices containing many interacting particles of one or more species; for this class of artificial motors, noise rectification results also from the interplay of particle Brownian motion and geometric constraints. Recently, selective control and optimization of the transport of interacting colloidal particles and magnetic vortices have been successfully achieved, thus leading to the new generation of microfluidic and superconducting devices presented here. The field has recently been enriched with impressive experimental achievements in building artificial Brownian motor devices that even operate within the quantum domain by harvesting quantum Brownian motion. Sundry akin topics include activities aimed at noise-assisted shuttling other degrees of freedom such as charge, spin, or even heat and the assembly of chemical synthetic molecular motors. This review ends with a perspective for future pathways and potential new applications.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63e7149844892216c37b6351f9fc7cbaeb0abe2a

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Citations in the corpus

Prediction (2010, neutral): “New phenomena appear, such as stochastic resonance [3 3], coherence resonance [97], noiseinduced phase transitions [57, 116], noise-induced transp ort [42] and its game theoretical version, the Parrondo’s Paradox [1].”
Squeezed Thermal Reservoirs as a Resource for a Nanomechanical Engine beyond the Carnot Limit (2017, background): “A major open question remains whether highly miniaturized heat engines, such as the one we report here, will be able to use the extracted work to accomplish mesoscopic tasks as transporting particles [38] or manipulating biological matter [39].”
A micrometre-sized heat engine operating between bacterial reservoirs (2016, background): “mechanisms of energy transduction in a regime that is dominated by fluctuations [1, 2].”
Experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion and validation of the generalized Jarzynski equality (2010, background): “The future challenge is to realize a nanoscale information-processing device such as an artificial molecular moto”
Realizing the physics of motile cilia synchronization with driven colloids (2015, background): “Coordinated motion is crucial for the effective functioning of cilia and flagella, the elements of eukaryotic cells implicated in generating fluid flows and motility (10, 14, 40), and may be exploited in artificial conditions (3, 67, 115, 130) and low Reynolds number (Re) swimmers (83, 102, 108).”
Realization of a micrometre-sized stochastic heat engine (2011, background): “Also, several types of Brownian motor have been discussed that are able to extract useful work by rectification of thermal nois”
Active Brownian particles (2012, background): “and we refer the interested reader to other comprehensive reviews on the subject [177,280,150].”
Colloquium : Phononics: Manipulating heat flow with electronic analogs and beyond (2011, methodology): “This then carries the setup away from thermal equilibrium, thereby circumventing the second law of thermodynamics, which otherwise would impose a vanishing directed transport (Hänggi and Marchesoni, 2009).”
Quantum thermodynamics (2015, neutral): “These modelsofquantumenginesareincontrastwithbiological motors that extract work from ﬂuctuations and have been studied extensively [154].”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “While the motion of passive Brownian particles is driven by equilibrium thermal fluctuations due to random collisions with the surrounding fluid molecules (Babič, Schmitt, and Bechinger, 2005), self-propelled Brownian particles exhibit an interplay between random fluctuations and active swimming tha”
Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale (2016, background): “The constructive role of Brownian motion for various physical and technological setups is reviewed in [436].”