ESCAPE OF A PERIODICALLY DRIVEN PARTICLE FROM A METASTABLE STATE IN A NOISY SYSTEM

We consider the statistical properties of the escape time of a particle initially sitting in a potential well subject to a combination of white noise and a periodic forcing term. As one finds in the case of the much-studied bistable potential, different kinds of resonant effects can occur, as measured by the survival probability and the average residence time. When this time is considered as a function of the noise strength, then we show that for small amplitudes of the forcing term there are no resonant effects, while for large amplitudes such effects can appear. We also show that a resonant phenomenon is possible in terms of the amplitude of a periodic forcing term.