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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Probability Distribution of the Residence Times in Periodically Fluctuating Metastable Systems

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We investigate experimentally and numerically the probability distribution of the residence times in periodically fluctuating metastable systems. The experiments are performed in a physical metastable system which is the series of a biasing resistor with a tunnel diode in parallel to a capacitor. The numerical simulations are performed in an overdamped model system with a time-dependent potential. We investigate both the cases where the system is deterministically overall-stable and overall-unstable. In the overall-unstable regime, the experimental and the numerically investigated systems show noise enhanced stability in the presence of a finite amount of noise. The determined P(T) is multi-peaked with an exponentially decaying envelop. We note that the shape of the nth peak in the P(T) is roughly fitted by a Gaussian function with standard deviation independent of n.