Ac-induced thermal vortex escape in magnetic-field-embedded long annular Josephson junctions

Abstract

We investigate theoretically the thermal escape behavior of trapped magnetic fluxons in long annular Josephson junctions in dc magnetic fields, and perturbed by a probing ac current. The study is motivated by recently published experimental data that show multi-peaked escape distributions for increasing bias current in the extreme low temperature regime when the system is perturbed by an ac current. We demonstrate that the observed behavior of multi-peaked escape distributions can be reproduced and predicted in the entirely classical, thermally driven sine-Gordon model, which is widely accepted as accurately describing the experimental system. We interpret the observed multi-peaked distributions as being directly induced by dynamical resonances between the applied ac perturbation and the natural oscillation frequency of a trapped fluxon.