Publication Date

2016

Journal or Book Title

Physics Letters A

Abstract

We consider a chain of torsionally-coupled, planar pendula shaken horizontally by an external sinusoidal driver. It has been known that in such a system, theoretically modeled by the discrete sine-Gordon equation, intrinsic localized modes, also known as discrete breathers, can exist. Recently, the existence of multifrequency breathers via subharmonic driving has been theoretically proposed and numerically illustrated by Xu et al. (2014) [21]. In this paper, we verify this prediction experimentally. Comparison of the experimental results to numerical simulations with realistic system parameters (including a Floquet stability analysis), and wherever possible to analytical results (e.g. for the subharmonic response of the single driven–damped pendulum), yields good agreement. Finally, we report the period-1 and multifrequency edge breathers which are localized at the open boundaries of the chain, for which we have again found good agreement between experiments and numerical computations.

Comments

ArXiv Preprint uploaded.

Pages

402-407

Volume

380

Issue

3

Included in

Mathematics Commons

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