Brownian motor with competing spatial and temporal asymmetry of potential energy

A Brownian motor is considered which operates due to asymmetric dichotomic fluctuations of the spatially periodic asymmetric potential energy. As shown, the motion direction and stopping points of this motor are dictated by the competition between the spatial and temporal asymmetry of the potential energy (or solely by temporal asymmetry in the case that the potential energy sign fluctuates). For an asymmetric sawtooth potential, the Brownian-particle average velocity is calculated numerically as a function of certain parameters of the model, whereas the low-frequency and low-energy approximations allow the corresponding analytical relationships to be derived for an arbitrarily shaped potential profile. It is shown that temporal asymmetry is not necessary for stopping point occurrence provided that the potential profile fluctuates not only in amplitude but in shape as well. This inference is illustrated by photoinduced fluctuations of the potential energy for a number of substituted arylpyrene molecules on a substrate with symmetrically distributed charge density.