Negative friction and mobilities induced by friction fluctuation

We study the transport phenomena of an inertial Brownian particle in a symmetric potential with periodicity, which is driven by an external time-periodic force and an external constant bias for both cases of the deterministic dynamics and the existence of friction coefficient fluctuations. For the deterministic case, it is shown that for suitable parameters, the existence of certain appropriate friction coefficients can enhance the transport of the particle, which may be interpreted as the negative friction coefficient; additionally, there coexist absolute, differential negative, and giant positive mobilities with increasing friction coefficients in the system. We analyze physical mechanisms hinted behind these findings via basins of attraction. For the existence of friction coefficient fluctuations, it is shown that the fluctuation can enhance or weaken, even eliminate these phenomena. We present the probability distribution of the particle’s velocity to interpret these mobilities and the suitable parameters’ regimes of these phenomena. In order to further understand the physical mechanism, we also study diffusions corresponding to these mobilities and find that for the small fluctuation, the negative friction appears, and there coexists absolute negative mobility, superdiffusion, and ballistic diffusion, whereas all of them vanish for the large fluctuation. Our findings may extensively exist in materials, including different defects, strains, the number of interfacial hydrogen bonds, the arrangements of ions, or graphite concentrations, which hints at the existence of different friction coefficients.