Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 201
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2014-50295-9

Regular Article

Transport and diffusion of underdamped Brownian particles in random potentials

¹ Departament d’Estructura i Constituents de la Matèria, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
² Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and BioCircuits Institute, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0340, USA

^a e-mail: sune@ecm.ub.edu

Received: 7 May 2014
Received in final form: 8 July 2014
Published online: 10 September 2014

Abstract

We present numerical results for the transport and diffusion of underdamped Brownian particles in one-dimensional disordered potentials. We compare the anomalies observed with those found in the overdamped regime and with results for a periodic potential. We relate these anomalies to the time dependent probability distributions for the position and velocity of the particles. The anomalies are caused by the random character of the barrier crossing events between locked and running states which is manifested in the spatial distributions. The role of the velocities is small because the particles quickly thermalize into locked or running states.