Interacting particles in disordered flashing ratchets

We study the steady state properties of a system of particles interacting via hard core exclusion and moving in a discrete flashing disordered ratchet potential. Quenched disorder is introduced by breaking the periodicity of the ratchet potential through changing shape of the potential across randomly chosen but fixed periods. We show that the effects of quenched disorder can be broadly classified as strong or weak with qualitatively different behaviour of the steady state particle flux as a function of overall particle density. We further show that most of the effects including a density driven nonequilibrium phase transition observed can be understood by constructing an effective asymmetric simple exclusion process with quenched disorder in the hop rates. (author)