We investigate a system of harmonically coupled identical nonlinearconstituents subject to noise in different spatial arrangements. For globalcoupling we find for infinitely many constituents the coexistence of severalergodic components and a bifurcation behaviour like in first order phasetransitions. These results are compared with simulations for finite systemsboth for global coupling and for nearest neighbour coupling on two- andthree-dimensional cubic lattices. The mean-field type results for globalcoupling provide a better understanding of the more complex behaviour in thelatter case.
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