ESCAPE OVER FLUCTUATING BARRIERS DRIVEN BY COLORED NOISE

Escape over fluctuating barriers in the presence of thermal white noise is addressed. Several general results are established, for stochastic barrier fluctuations being controlled by colored Gaussian noise. Our findings are exact in the limit of white noise sources and (partially) in the limit of extreme large noise color, and are approximate for intermediate noise color. As one main result we find that the escape time can generically exhibit a minimum resonant activation, whenever the colored noise intensity is an increasing function of the noise correlation time. The effects induced by correlated noise sources are addressed as well.