Fluctuating noise drives Brownian transport

Abstract

The transport properties of Brownian ratchet were studied in the presence of stochastic intensity noise in both overdamped and underdamped regimes. In the overdamped case, an analytical solution using the matrix-continued fraction method revealed the existence of a maximum current when the noise intensity fluctuates on intermediate timescale regions. Similar effects were observed for the underdamped case by Monte Carlo simulations. The optimal time-correlation for Brownian transport coincided with the experimentally observed time-correlation of the extrinsic noise in Escherichia coli gene expression and implied the importance of environmental noise for molecular mechanisms.© 2012 The Royal Society.