Single-file diffusion in spatially inhomogeneous systems

2023/06/18 by Sorkin, Benjamin, Dean, David S.
#FOS: Physical sciences #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.10500

Abstract

We study the effect of spatially-varying potential and diffusivity on the dispersion of a tracer particle in single-file diffusion. Non-interacting particles in such a system exhibit normal diffusion at late times, which is characterised by an effective diffusion constant D_eff. Here we demonstrate the physically appealing result that the dispersion of single-file tracers in this system has the same long-time behavior as that for Brownian particles in a spatially-homogeneous system with constant diffusivity D_eff. Our results are based on a late-time analysis of the Fokker-Planck equation, motivated by the mathematical theory of homogenization. The findings are confirmed by numerical simulations for both annealed and quenched initial conditions.

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