Diffusive transport by thermal velocity fluctuations

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.