Symmetry breaking of fluctuation dynamics by noise color.

Arrayas, M. and Dykman, Mark and Mannella, R. and McClintock, Peter V. E. and Stein, N. D. (2000) Symmetry breaking of fluctuation dynamics by noise color. Physical review letters, 84 (24). pp. 5470-5473. ISSN 1079-7114

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Abstract

Activated escape is investigated for systems that are driven by noise whose power spectrum peaks at a finite frequency. Analytic theory and analog and digital experiments show that the system dynamics during escape exhibit a symmetry-breaking transition as the width of the fluctuational spectral peak is varied. For double-well potentials, even a small asymmetry may result in a parametrically large difference of the activation energies for escape from different wells.