Observation of saddle-point avoidance in noise-induced escape

The first measurements of an exit location distribution are reported for an overdamped nonconservative system perturbed by weak white noise, modeled both numerically and by an analog electronic circuit. in the weak-noise limit the distribution is increasingly concentrated near a saddle point of the dynamics and is increasingly well approximated by a Weibull distribution, in agreement with theoretical predictions. A physical explanation for this behavior is given, which should facilitate the computation of corrections to the limiting form. [S0031-9007(99)08581-6].