Abstract

As early as 1894, Pierre Curie showed that Brownian particles which move in a periodic but asymmetric potential and are also subject to absorption and dissipation of energy (that is, a system which violates both parity and time reversal symmetries), will exhibit macroscopic motion even though they appear to be subject to no net force. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in such systems in the study of biological transport, where they have been proposed as an explanation for the ability of molecular motors to move large molecules without using macroscopic potential or thermal gradients. We present the realization of an analogous system in a one-dimensional grey optical lattice of laser-cooled neutral rubidium atoms.

© 1998 IEEE