Supratransmission in β-Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chains with different ranges of interactions

We study the phenomenon of supratransmission (that is, the sudden transmission of energy above a sharp threshold amplitude of periodic boundary excitations) on an N-particle one-dimensional β-Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) lattice, under different ranges of interactions. When the system is at rest, we set the first particle in sinusoidal motion at a frequency that lies in the forbidden band-gap of the linear nearest-neighbor FPU chain, and use reliable computational techniques to extend earlier results of energy supratransmission to FPU chains with varying ranges of particle interactions than simply nearest neighbors. We thus discover that supratranmission arises at similar amplitude thresholds as the nearest neighbor case, for a much wider class of short-range interaction systems. However, as the interaction range becomes longer and longer, the threshold amplitude for supratransmission recedes to higher and higher values. It would be highly desirable to verify these results analytically as well as experimentally in superconducting Josephson systems, or arrays of coupled optical waveguides.