Stokes efficiency of temporally rocked ratchets

Abstract

We study the generalized efficiency of an adiabatically rocked ratchet with both spatial and temporal asymmetry. We obtain an analytical expression for the generalized efficiency in the deterministic case. Generalized efficiency of the order of 50% is obtained by fine tuning of the parameter range. This is unlike the case of thermodynamic efficiency, where we could readily get an enhanced efficiency of up to 90%. The observed higher values of generalized efficiency is attributed to be due to the suppression of backward current. We have also discussed briefly the differences between thermodynamic, rectification or generalized efficiency and Stokes efficiency. The temperature is found to optimize the generalized efficiency over a wide range of parameter space, unlike in the case of thermodynamic efficiency.