Anomalous fluxes in overdamped Brownian dynamics with Lorentz force

Abstract: We study the stochastic motion of a particle subject to spatially varying Lorentz force in the small-mass limit. The limiting procedure yields an additional drift term in the overdamped equation that cannot be obtained by simply setting mass to zero in the velocity Langevin equation. We show that whereas the overdamped equation of motion accurately captures the position statistics of the particle, it leads to unphysical fluxes in the system that persist in the long time limit; an anomalous result inconsistent with thermal equilibrium. These fluxes are calculated analytically from the overdamped equation of motion and found to be in quantitative agreement with Brownian dynamics simulations. Our study suggests that the overdamped approximation, though perfectly suited for position statistics, can yield unphysical values for velocity-dependent variables such as flux and entropy production.