Communication: Impact of inertia on biased Brownian transport in confined geometries

Abstract

We consider the impact of inertia on biased Brownian motion of point-size particles in a two-dimensional channel with sinusoidally varying width. If the time scales of the problem separate, the adiabatic elimination of the transverse degrees of freedom leads to an effective description for the motion along the channel given by the potential of mean force. The possibility of such description is intimately connected with equipartition. Numerical simulations show that in the presence of external bias the equipartition may break down leading to non-monotonic dependence of mobility on external force and several other interesting effects.