Self-organized escape of oscillator chains in nonlinear potentials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a deterministic nonlinear oscillator chain can spontaneously and rapidly escape from a metastable state through self-organized localized modes, surpassing noise-assisted transitions in speed under certain energy conditions.

Contribution

It reveals a novel noise-free, collective escape mechanism in nonlinear oscillator chains driven purely by internal dynamics and energy redistribution.

Findings

Localized modes grow into critical nuclei facilitating escape

Deterministic escape can be faster than noise-assisted transitions

Energy redistribution leads to spontaneous, collective barrier crossing

Abstract

We present the noise free escape of a chain of linearly interacting units from a metastable state over a cubic on-site potential barrier. The underlying dynamics is conservative and purely deterministic. The mutual interplay between nonlinearity and harmonic interactions causes an initially uniform lattice state to become unstable, leading to an energy redistribution with strong localization. As a result a spontaneously emerging localized mode grows into a critical nucleus. By surpassing this transition state, the nonlinear chain manages a self-organized, deterministic barrier crossing. Most strikingly, these noise-free, collective nonlinear escape events proceed generally by far faster than transitions assisted by thermal noise when the ratio between the average energy supplied per unit in the chain and the potential barrier energy assumes small values.