Order-by-disorder in classical oscillator systems

We consider classical nonlinear oscillators on hexagonal lattices. When the coupling between the elements is repulsive, we observe coexisting states, each one with its own basin of attraction. These states differ by their degree of synchronization and by patterns of phase-locked motion. When disorder is introduced into the system by additive or multiplicative Gaussian noise, we observe a non-monotonic dependence of the degree of order in the system as a function of the noise intensity: intervals of noise intensity with low synchronization between the oscillators alternate with intervals where more oscillators are synchronized. In the latter case, noise induces a higher degree of order in the sense of a larger number of nearly coinciding phases. This order-by-disorder effect is reminiscent to the analogous phenomenon known from spin systems. Surprisingly, this non-monotonic evolution of the degree of order is found not only for a single interval of intermediate noise strength, but repeatedly as a function of increasing noise intensity. We observe noise-driven migration of oscillator phases in a rough potential landscape.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures; comments are welcom

Steady Stokes flow with long-range correlations, fractal Fourier spectrum, and anomalous transport

We consider viscous two-dimensional steady flows of incompressible fluids past doubly periodic arrays of solid obstacles. In a class of such flows, the autocorrelations for the Lagrangian observables decay in accordance with the power law, and the Fourier spectrum is neither discrete nor absolutely continuous. We demonstrate that spreading of the droplet of tracers in such flows is anomalously fast. Since the flow is equivalent to the integrable Hamiltonian system with 1 degree of freedom, this provides an example of integrable dynamics with long-range correlations, fractal power spectrum, and anomalous transport properties.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, published in Physical Review Letter

Electromagnetic Oscillations in a Driven Nonlinear Resonator: A New Description of Complex Nonlinear Dynamics

Many intriguing properties of driven nonlinear resonators, including the appearance of chaos, are very important for understanding the universal features of nonlinear dynamical systems and can have great practical significance. We consider a cylindrical cavity resonator driven by an alternating voltage and filled with a nonlinear nondispersive medium. It is assumed that the medium lacks a center of inversion and the dependence of the electric displacement on the electric field can be approximated by an exponential function. We show that the Maxwell equations are integrated exactly in this case and the field components in the cavity are represented in terms of implicit functions of special form. The driven electromagnetic oscillations in the cavity are found to display very interesting temporal behavior and their Fourier spectra contain singular continuous components. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the existence of a singular continuous (fractal) spectrum in an exactly integrable system.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Modeling rhythmic patterns in the hippocampus

We investigate different dynamical regimes of neuronal network in the CA3 area of the hippocampus. The proposed neuronal circuit includes two fast- and two slowly-spiking cells which are interconnected by means of dynamical synapses. On the individual level, each neuron is modeled by FitzHugh-Nagumo equations. Three basic rhythmic patterns are observed: gamma-rhythm in which the fast neurons are uniformly spiking, theta-rhythm in which the individual spikes are separated by quiet epochs, and theta/gamma rhythm with repeated patches of spikes. We analyze the influence of asymmetry of synaptic strengths on the synchronization in the network and demonstrate that strong asymmetry reduces the variety of available dynamical states. The model network exhibits multistability; this results in occurrence of hysteresis in dependence on the conductances of individual connections. We show that switching between different rhythmic patterns in the network depends on the degree of synchronization between the slow cells.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Using the Hadamard and related transforms for simplifying the spectrum of the quantum baker's map

We rationalize the somewhat surprising efficacy of the Hadamard transform in simplifying the eigenstates of the quantum baker's map, a paradigmatic model of quantum chaos. This allows us to construct closely related, but new, transforms that do significantly better, thus nearly solving for many states of the quantum baker's map. These new transforms, which combine the standard Fourier and Hadamard transforms in an interesting manner, are constructed from eigenvectors of the shift permutation operator that are also simultaneous eigenvectors of bit-flip (parity) and possess bit-reversal (time-reversal) symmetry.Comment: Version to appear in J. Phys. A. Added discussions; modified title; corrected minor error