Weak chaos and fractional dynamics in an optically driven colloidal ring

Three colloidal spheres driven around a ring-like optical trap known as an optical vortex have been predicted to undergo periodic collective motion due to their hydrodynamic coupling. In fact, the quenched disorder in the optically-implemented potential energy landscape drives a transition to instability evolving into microscopic weak chaos with fractional dynamics. As a result, the relation between the space-time selfsimilarity of the system’s collective transport properties and its microscopic weak chaos dynamics is revealed.