Driven kinks in discrete chains: phonon damping.
Phonon radiation is shown numerically to damp the motion of a relativistically driven straight phi(4) soliton, even in the extremely weak discreteness limit. At higher discreteness, the soliton mobility is characterized by a discontinuous dependence on the driving force; jumps are related to phonon and breather-radiation thresholds. Moreover, the speed of a frictionless soliton cannot be lowered below a certain threshold value, or else it might get trapped between two adjacent chain sites.
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Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Perugia, I-06123 Perugia, Italy.
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