8 research outputs found
Soliton ratchets induced by ac forces with harmonic mixing
The ratchet dynamics of a kink (topological soliton) of a dissipative
sine-Gordon equation in the presence of ac forces with harmonic mixing (at
least bi-harmonic) of zero mean is studied. The dependence of the kink mean
velocity on system parameters is investigated numerically and the results are
compared with a perturbation analysis based on a point particle representation
of the soliton. We find that first order perturbative calculations lead to
incomplete descriptions, due to the important role played by the soliton-phonon
interaction in establishing the phenomenon. The role played by the temporal
symmetry of the system in establishing soliton ratchets is also emphasized. In
particular, we show the existence of an asymmetric internal mode on the kink
profile which couples to the kink translational mode through the damping in the
system. Effective soliton transport is achieved when the internal mode and the
external force get phase locked. We find that for kinks driven by bi-harmonic
drivers consisting of the superposition of a fundamental driver with its first
odd harmonic, the transport arises only due to this {\it internal mode}
mechanism, while for bi-harmonic drivers with even harmonic superposition, also
a point-particle contribution to the drift velocity is present. The phenomenon
is robust enough to survive the presence of thermal noise in the system and can
lead to several interesting physical applications.Comment: 9 pages, 13 figure