Profiling the overdamped dynamics of a nonadiabatic system

Rapidly oscillating time-periodic potentials with a vanishing time average have been exploited to investigate the dynamics of an overdamped particle. Using the multiple scale perturbation theory, it has been shown that the dynamics can be adequately characterized by an explicitly time-independent effective potential. The resulting "effective equation of motion" can offer various avenues to handle the dynamics of the system driven by a high-frequency field. We study the effects of the field parameters on the mobility of the overdamped particle moving in the effective potential. The variation of the mobility with the field parameters is associated with the interplay of spatially periodic gradients, time periodic modulation and thermal noise in the overdamped region. Good agreement between the simulations and theoretical estimates validates our methodology that captures the constitutional features ruling the dynamics in the overdamped limit. The results observed here can also be extended to the quantum system. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.