Thermal diffusion of supersonic solitons in an anharmonic chain of atoms

We study the nonequilibrium diffusion dynamics of supersonic lattice solitons in a classical chain of atoms with nearest-neighbor interactions coupled to a heat bath. As a specific example we choose an interaction with cubic anharmonicity. The coupling between the system and a thermal bath with a given temperature is made by adding noise, delta correlated in time and space, and damping to the set of discrete equations of motion. Working in the continuum limit and changing to the sound velocity frame we derive a Korteweg-de Vries equation with noise and damping. We apply a collective coordinate approach which yields two stochastic ODEs which are solved approximately by a perturbation analysis. This finally yields analytical expressions for the variances of the soliton position and velocity. We perform Langevin dynamics simulations for the original discrete system which confirm the predictions of our analytical calculations, namely, noise-induced superdiffusive behavior which scales with the temperature and depends strongly on the initial soliton velocity. A normal diffusion behavior is observed for solitons with very low energy, where the noise-induced phonons also make a significant contribution to the soliton diffusion.