Long-lived states of oscillator chains with dynamical traps

The European Physical Journal B. 2005. Vol. 44. P. 63–70.

Lubashevsky I., Mahnke R., Hajimahmoodzadeh M., Katsnelson A.

An oscillator chain with dynamical traps and additive white noise is considered. Its dynamics are studied numerically. New type nonequilibrium phase transitions are shown to arise in the case when the trap effect is pronounced. Locally they manifest themselves in distortion of the symmetry of particle arrangement. Depending on the system parameters, the particle arrangement is characterized by the corresponding distributions taking either a bimodal form, or a twoscale one, or a unimodal onescale form that, however, deviates substantially from the Gaussian distribution. The particle velocities also exhibit a number of anomalies, in particular, their distribution can be extremely wide or take a quasi-cusp form. A large number of various cooperative structures and superstructures are found in the visualized time patterns. In a certain sense their evolution is independent of the individual particle dynamics, enabling us to regard them as dynamical phases.

Keywords: dynamical trap, nonequilibrium phase transitions