Hysteresis resulting from Lennard-Jones interactions

The fundamental mechanism of hysteresis in the quasistatic limit of multi-stable systems is associated with transitions of the system from one local minimum of the potential energy to another. In this scenario, as system parameters are (quasistatically) varied, the transition is prompted when a saddle-node bifurcation eliminates the minimum where the system resides in. The objective of the present work is to specify this generic mechanism for systems of interacting particles assuming a natural single-well (Lennard-Jones) interaction potential for each pair of particles. We show multi-stability and present details of hysteresis scenarios with the associated bifurcations and transitions in a case study of constrained four-degrees-of-freedom four particle systems on the plane.