Analysis of vibrational resonance in an oscillator with exponential mass variation

This study investigated vibrational resonance (VR) in a Duffing-type oscillator with position-dependent mass (PDM) distribution defined by spatially varying exponential function. The role of two PDM parameters, the fixed rest mass m0 and nonlinear strength k on observed resonances was investigated from the analytical and numerical computation of response amplitude Q, which is a measure of the amplification of a low-frequency (LF) signal through the introduction and modulation of a high-frequency (HF) signal in a weakly driven nonlinear system. The method of direct separation of motion was used to analytically compute the response amplitude, while the numerically computed response amplitude was obtained from the Fourier spectrum of the output signal. Single resonance peaks with good agreement between the numerically and the analytically computed responses were observed for the traditional HF-induced VR and the PDM-induced resonances. The results demonstrated that spatial mass perturbation can play the roles of HF signals typically used in traditional VR setups. The results of this investigation corroborate earlier reports that stated PDM parameters can complement the HF signal to control the observed resonance peaks. However, the exponentially varying PDM parameters did not initiate double or multiple resonances as reported for other mass distributions such as the regular mass function and the doubly-singular mass function. This study communicates that the nature of the PDM distribution actually determines the possibility of generating new peaks from observed resonances.