Transport of Ions by the Thermally Anisotropic Brownian Ratchet Microchip
Taku Ohara, Takeo Nakano and Daichi Torii
The Brownian ratchet is a transport method of charged particles. Thermally excited Brownian motion of particles, which is isotropic in its original nature, can be rectified to exhibit net mass flux in a certain direction by applying asymmetric potential that drives the particles intermittently. In the present study, a new mode of the Brownian ratchet proposed by the authors, in which the combination of a nonuniform temperature field and a spatially symmetric ratchet works to rectify the mass diffusion and generate net mass flux of charged particles, is analyzed by a detailed computational simulation considering ion motion and transient electric field.