Role of the initial conditions on the enhancement of the escape time in static and fluctuating potentials

✍ Scribed by A Fiasconaro; D Valenti; B Spagnolo

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 410 KB
• Volume: 325
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0378-4371
• DOI: 10.1016/s0378-4371(03)00192-4

✦ Synopsis

We present a study of the noise driven escape of an overdamped Brownian particle moving in a cubic potential proÿle with a metastable state. We analyze the role of the initial conditions of the particle on the enhancement of the average escape time as a function of the noise intensity for ÿxed and uctuating potentials. We observe the noise enhanced stability e ect for all the initial unstable states investigated. For a ÿxed potential we ÿnd a peculiar initial condition xc which separates the set of the initial unstable states in two regions: those which give rise to divergences from those which show nonmonotonic behavior of the average escape time. For uctuating potential at this particular initial condition and for low noise intensity we ÿnd large uctuations of the average escape time.