Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 33: Brownian Motion, Stochastic Processes, Transport I

DY 33.2: Talk

Thursday, March 17, 2011, 14:15–14:30, HÜL 186

Escape rate of an active Brownian particle — •P. Sekhar Burada and Benjamin Lindner — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany

We study the dynamics of an active Brownian particle in a spatial cubic potential, in particular, its rate of escape over the potential barrier. Here, we consider an effective nonlinear friction function, which acts as an energy pump for the Brownian particle, and study the escape dynamics of the particle by varying the amplitude of spatial cubic potential. In contrast to the Arrhenius law for the escape rate found for a normal ("passive") Brownian particle, the escape rate of an active particle shows a non-monotonic dependence on the strength of fluctuations. We explain the stochastic mechanism for this remarkable effect.