Corrections to Einstein's relation for Brownian motion in a tilted periodic potential (Q1946816)

The study of the Brownian motion in a tilted periodic potential for arbitrary values of the drift and of the tilt is the main goal of this paper. Using homogenization theory, the authors are able to derive general formulae for the effective velocity and the effective diffusion tensor that are valid for arbitrary tilts. They also obtain power series expansions for the velocity and the diffusion coefficient as functions of the external forcing. The coefficients in this expansion relate the nonequilibrium transport coefficients to statistical averages involving the equilibrium dynamics (with no imposed tilt), computed through the solutions of boundary value problems for deterministic partial differential equations of hypoelliptic type. The expansions give a detailed description of how Einstein's relation between the diffusivity and mobility of a particle is violated in higher orders with respect to the perturbation from equilibrium. These theoretical results are confirmed by numerical simulations. The paper is divided into five sections and two appendices. In Section 2, the formulas for the drift and diffusion coefficients are presented obtained using homogenization theory. In Section 3, the calculations of the power series expansions for the drift and the diffusion coefficient are given. Section 4 presents results of numerical simulations and Section 5 summarizes the paper. The appendices show the details of the spectral method for the solution to the Poisson equation and discuss how the proposed formulas relate to an alternative approach in the literature.