1205.3592 (M. Mulansky et al.)

Scaling of Energy Spreading in Strongly Nonlinear Lattices    [PDF]

M. Mulansky, A. Pikovsky

We study scaling properties of energy spreading in disordered strongly nonlinear lattices. Such lattices consist of nonlinearly coupled local linear or nonlinear oscillators, and demonstrate a rather slow, subdiffusive spreading of initially localized wave packets. We use a nonlinear diffusion equation as a heuristic model of this process, and confirm that the scaling predictions resulting from the self-similar solution of this equation are indeed valid for all studied cases. We show that the spreading in nonlinearly coupled linear oscillators slows down compared to a pure power law, while for nonlinear local oscillators a power law is valid in the whole studied range of parameters.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.3592