Observation of multiple attractors and diffusive transport in a periodically driven Klein-Gordon chain

Abstract

We consider a Klein-Gordon chain that is periodically driven at one end and has dissipation at one or both boundaries. An interesting numerical observation in a recent study~[arXiv:2209.03977] was that for driving frequency in the phonon band, there is a range of values of the driving amplitude $F_d\in (F_1, F_2)$ over which the energy current remains constant. In this range, the system exhibits a "resonant nonlinear wave" (RNW) mode of energy transmission which is a time and space periodic solution. It was noted that the range $(F_1,F_2)$, for which the RNW mode occurs, shrinks with increasing system size $N$ and disappears eventually. Remarkably, we find that the RNW mode is in fact a stable solution even for $F_d$ much larger than $F_2$ and quite large $N$ ($\approx 1000$). For $F_d>F_{2}$, there exists a second attractor which is chaotic. Both attractors have finite basins of attraction and can be reached by appropriate choice of initial conditions. Corresponding to the two attractors for large $F_d$, the system can now be in two nonequilibrium steady states. We improve the perturbative treatment of [arXiv:2209.03977] for the RNW mode by including the contributions of the third harmonics. We also consider the effect of thermal noise at the boundaries and find that the RNW mode is stable for small temperatures. Finally, we present results for a different driving protocol studied in [arXiv:2205.03839] where $F_d$ is taken to scale with system size as $N^{-1/2}$ and there is dissipation only at the non-driven end. We find that the steady state can be characterized by Fourier's law as in [arXiv:2205.03839] for a stochastic model. We point out interesting differences that occur since our dynamics is nonlinear and Hamiltonian. Our results suggest the intriguing possibility of observing the high current carrying RNW phase in experiments by careful preparation of initial conditions.