Vibrational resonance

The effect of a high-frequency force on the response of a bistable system to a low-frequency signal is considered for both the overdamped and weakly damped cases. It is shown that the response can be optimized by an appropriate choice of vibration amplitude. This vibrational resonance displays many analogies to the well known phenomenon of stochastic resonance, but with the vibrational force filling the role usually played by noise.