Critical manifold of globally coupled overdamped anharmonic oscillators driven by additive Gaussian white noise

TL;DR

This paper proves the existence of a well-defined critical manifold in a system of globally coupled overdamped anharmonic oscillators with additive Gaussian white noise, distinguishing phases with symmetric and broken symmetry.

Contribution

It introduces a rigorous proof of the critical manifold's existence and characterizes the symmetry-breaking mechanisms in weak and strong noise regimes.

Findings

Critical manifold separates symmetric and symmetry-broken phases.

Different symmetry-breaking mechanisms for weak and strong noise.

Analytic expressions for order parameter and susceptibility near criticality.

Abstract

We prove for an infinite array of globally coupled overdamped anharmonic oscillators subject to additive Gaussian white noise the existence of a well-behaved critical manifold in the parameter space which separates a symmetric phase from a symmetry broken phase. Given two of the system parameters there is an unique critical value of the third. The proof exploits that the critical control parameter a_c is bounded by its limit values for weak and for strong noise. In these limits the mechanism of symmetry breaking differs. For weak noise the distribution is Gaussian and the symmetry is broken as the whole distribution is shifted in either the positive or the negative direction. For strong noise there is a symmetric double-peak distribution and the symmetry is broken as the weights of the peaks become different. We derive an ordinary differential equation whose solution describes the critical manifold. Using a series ansatz to solve this differential equation we determine the critical manifold for weak and for strong noise and compare it to numerical results. We derive analytic expressions for the order parameter and the susceptibility close to the critical manifold.