Thermal diffusion of sine-Gordon solitons

Abstract:

We analyze the diffusive motion of kink solitons governed by the thermal sine-Gordon equation. We analytically calculate the correlation function of the position of the kink center as well as the diffusion coefficient, both up to second-order in temperature. We find that the kink behavior is very similar to that obtained in the overdamped limit: There is a quadratic dependence on temperature in the diffusion coefficient that comes from the interaction among the kink and phonons, and the average value of the wave function increases with due to the variance of the centers of individual realizations and not due to kink distortions. These analytical results are fully confirmed by numerical simulations.