Stochastic Resonance in a simple model of magnetic reversals

TL;DR

This paper investigates how stochastic resonance, enhanced by turbulence, can lead to magnetic reversals in a simple model, showing that turbulence can significantly amplify the resonance effect.

Contribution

It demonstrates that turbulent fluctuations can non-trivially amplify stochastic resonance in magnetic reversal models, reducing the external perturbation needed for resonance.

Findings

Turbulent fluctuations amplify stochastic resonance effects.

The model shows bimodal magnetic field distributions.

Resonance occurs at lower perturbation amplitudes due to turbulence.

Abstract

We discuss the effect of stochastic resonance in a simple model of magnetic reversals. The model exhibits statistically stationary solutions and bimodal distribution of the large scale magnetic field. We observe a non trivial amplification of stochastic resonance induced by turbulent fluctuations, i.e. the amplitude of the external periodic perturbation needed for stochastic resonance to occur is much smaller than the one estimated by the equilibrium probability distribution of the unperturbed system. We argue that similar amplifications can be observed in many physical systems where turbulent fluctuations are needed to maintain large scale equilibria.