Abstract
We study the driven Brownian motion of hard rods in a one-dimensional cosine potential with a large amplitude compared to the thermal energy. In a closed system, we find surprising features of the steady-state current in dependence of the particle density.
The form of the current-density relation changes greatly with the particle size and can exhibit both a local maximum and minimum. The changes are caused by an interplay of a barrier reduction, blocking, and exchange symmetry effect.
The latter leads to a current equal to that of noninteracting particles for a particle size commensurate with the period length of the cosine potential. For an open system coupled to particle reservoirs, we predict five different phases of nonequilibrium steady states to occur.
Our results show that the particle size can be of crucial importance for nonequilibrium phase transitions in driven systems. Possible experiments for demonstrating our findings are pointed out.