Eur. Phys. J. B 69, 19-22 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2009-00050-6

Stochastic resonance in bistable confining potentials

On the role of confinement

¹ National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics, Rävala 10, 15042 Tallinn, Estonia
² IFISC, Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos (CSIC-UIB), 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
³ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Camerino, 62032 Camerino, Italy

Corresponding author: ^a els@ifisc.uib-csic.es

Received: 19 December 2008
Revised: 13 January 2009
Published online: 18 February 2009

Abstract

We study the effects of the confining conditions on the occurrence of stochastic resonance (SR) in continuous bistable systems. We model such systems by means of double-well potentials that diverge like |x|^q for |x|↦∞. For super-harmonic (hard) potentials with q > 2 the SR peak sharpens with increasing q, whereas for sub-harmonic (soft) potentials, q < 2, it gets suppressed.