Observation-time-induced crossover in driven anomalous transport

Abstract We investigate how a weak constant force becomes detectable through fluctuations in anomalous transport in strongly heterogeneous media. Rather than focusing on the mean drift, we show that the key signature of the force appears in the variance of the particle displacement. As representative models, we study a driven continuous-time random walk (CTRW) with nearest-neighbor jumps and a driven quenched trap model with a power-law waiting-time tail. By analyzing the force dependence of the displacement variance, we quantify how fluctuations respond to weak driving. We find that for α < 2 , the response exhibits an observation-time-induced crossover: at fixed bias, the variance initially follows its unbiased scaling and only at later times crosses over to a force-dominated nonequilibrium regime. Equivalently, at fixed observation time t , there exists a threshold bias ε c ( t ) separating an apparently equilibrium-like regime from a detectable nonequilibrium response. This threshold decreases with increasing t , implying that weaker forces become observable over longer measurement windows. Quenched disorder further lowers the detection threshold compared with CTRW, and the crossover reflects a competition between the finite observation time and the intrinsic relaxation time of the driven heterogeneous system.