Symmetry properties of fluctuations in an actively driven rotor**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11422427 and 11402069) and the Program for Professor of Special Appointment at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning, China (Grant No. GZ2016004).

Abstract

We investigate rotational dynamics of an actively driven rotor through experiments and numerical simulations. While probability density distributions of rotor angular velocity are strongly non-Gaussian, relative probabilities of observing rotation in opposite directions are shown to be linearly related to the angular velocity magnitude. We construct a stochastic model to describe transitions between different states from rotor angular velocity data and use the stochastic model to show that symmetry properties in probability density distributions are related to the detailed fluctuation relation (FR) of entropy productions.