Flashing subdiffusive ratchets in viscoelastic media

We study subdiffusive ratchet transport in periodically and randomly flashing potentials. A central Brownian particle is elastically coupled to the surrounding auxiliary Brownian quasi-particles, which account for the influence of the viscoelastic environment. Similar to standard dynamical modeling of Brownian motion, the external force influences only the motion of the central particle, not affecting directly the environmental degrees of freedom. Just a handful of auxiliary Brownian particles suffices to model subdiffusion over many temporal decades. Time modulation of the potential violates the symmetry of thermal detailed balance and induces an anomalous subdiffusive current which exhibits a remarkably small dispersion at low temperatures, as well as a number of other surprising features such as saturation at low temperatures, and multiple inversions of the transport direction upon a change of the driving frequency in the non-adiabatic regime. It is shown that the subdiffusive current is finite at zero temperature for random flashing and can be finite for periodic flashing for a certain frequency window. Our study generalizes classical Brownian motors towards operating in sticky viscoelastic environments such as the cytosol of biological cells or dense polymer solutions.