Metastable escape is ubiquitous in many physical systems and is becoming a concern in engineering design as these designs (e.g., swarms of vehicles, coupled building energetics, nanoengineering, etc.) become more inspired by dynamics of biological, molecular and other natural systems. In light of this, we study a chain of coupled bistable oscillators which has two global conformations and we investigate how specialized or targeted disturbance is funneled in an inverse energy cascade and ultimately influences the transition process between the conformations. We derive a multiphase averaged approximation to these dynamics which illustrates the influence of actions in modal coordinates on the coarse behavior of this process. An activation condition that predicts how the disturbance influences the rate of transition is then derived. The prediction tools are derived for deterministic dynamics and we also present analogous behavior in the stochastic setting and show a divergence from Kramers activation behavior under targeted activation conditions.

• Received 13 October 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.81.026603