Frequency locking and nonlocal transport in charge-density-wave conductors

The boundary conditions imposed by current injection electrodes on steady-state sliding of a charge-density wave (CDW) cause the formation of a macroscopic CDW strain field. When two segments of a crystal are independently biased, the resulting strain field can couple CDW transport in these segments. Using a one-dimensional classical deformable medium model that includes phase slip, we calculate how the CDW current in each segment varies with the two biases. The results are in excellent qualitative agreement with experiments on nonlocal CDW behavior in NbSe3, and indicate that the boundary conditions imposed by phase slip and the resulting long-range elastic interactions profoundly affect measured CDW transport properties in experiments utilizing multiple current injection electrodes.