Limit cycles of the ballast resistor caused by intrinsic instabilities

Abstract

Spatio-temporal patterns of the ballast resistor are investigated. It is well known that in a voltage-controlled ballast resistor an electrothermal instability leads to stable stationary states consisting of hot and cold domains. Such states may become oscillatory unstable, giving rise to the bifurcation of limit cycles. These limit cycles are not caused by the external circuit but by a recently proposed novel intrinsic mechanism. There are two types of oscillatory instabilities: bulk instabilities and boundary-induced instabilities. The bulk instabilities are caused by resistivities which are not monotonically increasing functions of the temperature. The boundary-induced instabilities occur in small systems with Neumann boundary conditions. To find the bulk instability, experiments with materials showing a metal-semiconductor transition or high-temperature superconductors are suggested. To understand these new phenomena, the equation of motion is reduced to ordinary differential equations where the instabilities can be discussed analytically.