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Plasmonic Brownian ratchet

Here we present a Brownian ratchet based on plasmonic interactions. By periodically turning on and off a laser beam that illuminates a periodic array of plasmonic nanostructures with broken spatial symmetry, the random thermal motion of a subwavelength dielectric bead is rectified into one direction. By means of the Molecular Dynamics technique we show a statistical directed drift in particle flow.