SOLITON - ASSISTED ACTIVATION PROCESSES

This paper deals with the problem of energetic activation of one or few degrees of freedom of a spatially extended system. The fusion of soliton-like excitations is an efficient nonlinear mechanism to generate high-energy events at soft springs which are embedded in a one-dimensional chain of hard springs. In equilibrium there exists an optimum temperature where thermal energy is mainly partitioned to the soft springs due to the superposition of thermally generated solitons. Some of the features obtained for the one-dimensional system also apply to a solution of soft spheres in a hard-sphere solvent.