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Published on: September 13, 2011
Nonequilibrium transient phenomena in the washboard potential
Chungho Cheng1, Matteo Cirillo2, Gaetano Salina3
1Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA.
Abstract:
Transient properties of the one-dimensional washboard potential are investigated in order to understand observed modulations in the statistics of escape events. Specifically, we analyze the effects of different kinds of initial conditions on the escape distribution obtained by linearly increasing the tilt of the potential. Despite the complexity of the dynamics leading up to the eventual escape, we find that the overall statistics can be interpreted in terms of the system parameters, which offers illuminating perspectives for driven one-dimensional systems with washboard potentials. We choose parameters sets relevant for Josephson junctions, a commonly studied system due to both its applications and its use as a model system in condensed matter physics.
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