Diffusive transport by thermal velocity fluctuations

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 May 20;106(20):204501. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.204501. Epub 2011 May 16.

Abstract

We study the contribution of advection by thermal velocity fluctuations to the effective diffusion coefficient in a mixture of two identical fluids. We find good agreement between a simple fluctuating hydrodynamics theory and particle and finite-volume simulations. The enhancement of the diffusive transport depends on the system size L and grows as ln(L/L₀) in quasi-two-dimensional systems, while in three dimensions it scales as L₀⁻¹ - L⁻¹, where L₀ is a reference length. Our results demonstrate that fluctuations play an important role in the hydrodynamics of small-scale systems.