Breather arrest, localization, and acoustic non-reciprocity in dissipative nonlinear lattices

The effect of on-site damping on breather arrest, localization, and non-reciprocity in strongly nonlinear lattices is analytically and numerically studied. Breathers are localized oscillatory wavepackets formed by nonlinearity and dispersion. Breather arrest refers to breather disintegration over a finite “penetration depth” in a dissipative lattice. First, a simplified system of two nonlinearly coupled oscillators under impulsive excitation is considered. The exact relation between the number of beats (energy exchanges between oscillators), the excitation magnitude, and the on-site damping is derived. Then, these analytical results are correlated to those of the semi-infinite extension of the simplified system, where breather penetration depth is governed by a similar law to that of the finite beats in the simplified system. Finally, motivated by the experimental results of Bunyan, Moore, Mojahed, Fronk, Leamy, Tawfick, and Vakakis [Phys. Rev. E 97, 052211 (2018)], breather arrest, localization, and acoustic non-reciprocity in a non-symmetric, dissipative, strongly nonlinear lattice are studied. The lattice consists of repetitive cells of linearly grounded large-scale particles nonlinearly coupled to small-scale ones, and linear intra-cell coupling. Non-reciprocity in this lattice yields either energy localization or breather arrest depending on the position of excitation. The nonlinear acoustics governing non-reciprocity, and the surprising effects of existence of linear components in the coupling nonlinear stiffnesses, in the acoustics, are investigated.