Noise induced escape through an unstable limit cycle in the presence of a fluctuatingbarrier

Abstract

The escape of Brownian particles through an unstable limit cycle in the presence ofdeterministic barrier fluctuations has been studied. It has been observed that withincreasing non-Gaussian character of the noise, resonant activation gets suppressed andperiodically forced resonant activation becomes robust. Secondly, the ratio of the meanlifetimes in the presence and in the absence of barrier fluctuation increases very rapidlywith the damping constant for Gaussian noise unlike that for the non-Gaussian case. Thisratio decreases sharply for deviation of the noise behavior from Gaussian characteristics.The Arrhenius plot, on the other hand, exhibits deviation from linearity particularly atlarge noise strength for both Gaussian and non-Gaussian cases. The deviation is large fornon-Gaussian noise. We have also shown that additive colored non-Gaussian noise caninduce RA-like phenomena even in a system having harmonic potential energy.