Fronts in a continuous bistable system under periodically oscillating forcing

¹ Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University - 52 900 Ramat-Gan, Israel
² Semiconductor Physics Institute - Gostauto 11, 2600 Vilnius, Lithuania

Corresponding authors: bassfr@mail.biu.ac.il bakanas@uj.pfi.lt

Received: 3 July 2000
Accepted: 11 December 2000

Abstract

The propagation of a stable front in a dissipative bistable system that is influenced by the periodically oscillating forcing is examined. The evolution of the front is described by the nonlinear PDE (partial differential equation) of the parabolic type with the considered rate function of N-type. The one-dimensional front propagation is examined within the adiabatic approximation, i.e., the oscillations of the disturbing forcing are assumed to be slow enough. The pulling effect of the fronts is found, i.e., it is shown that the mean velocity of the perturbed front is increased as compared to that of the unperturbed front. The explicit expressions which describe the characteristic parameters of the perturbed front are presented for the particular case of the cubic polynomial rate function.