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May 16, 2020 10:25 IJMPB S0217979220501258 page 1
International Journal of Modern Physics B
Vol. 34, No. 12 (2020) 2050125 (18 pages)
©World Scientific Publishing Company
DOI: 10.1142/S0217979220501258
Directional transport of active particles in the two-dimensional
asymmetric ratchet potential field
Yu-Qing Wang∗, Cheng Huang and Chao-Fan Zhou
School of Mechanical Engineering, Hefei University of Technology,
Hefei, Anhui 230009, P. R. China
∗yuqingw@hfut.edu.cn
Chang Xu
School of Physical Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China,
Hefei, Anhui 230026, P. R. China
Sheng-Jie Qiang
East China Jiaotong University, Nanchang, Jiangxi 330013, P. R. China
Ju-Chen Li
School of Electromechanical Engineering,
Anhui Wenda University of Information Engineering,
Hefei, Anhui 231201, P. R. China
Received 28 January 2020
Revised 3 March 2020
Accepted 10 March 2020
Published 15 May 2020
Relationship between matter and energy transport has always been one of the key issues
that researchers have been searching for in statistical physics and complexity science.
In many transport phenomena, the active transport with zero or even no external force
in life activities has attracted extensive attention of scholars. As a special kind of ac-
tive particles, active Brownian particles have received the attention of physicists and
biophysicists. These active particles are natural or artificially designed particles, whose
scale is in the order of micrometer or nanometer. Different from the traditional pas-
sive Brownian particles driven by the equilibrium heat wave generated by the random
collision of the surrounding fluid molecules, active Brownian particles can extract en-
ergy from their own environment to drive their own motion. Here, directional transport
process of active particles in the two-dimensional asymmetric ratchet potential field
is analyzed. Both the overdamped medium and the critically damped one are empha-
sized. Langevin equations with inertia term are introduced to describe the impacts of
the self-driven force, friction coefficient, etc. on the directional motion. Then, the aver-
age particle speed is found. Thereafter, the relationships between the speed and critical
parameters like self-driven force, friction coefficient, etc. are obtained. Two different
∗Corresponding author.
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