Thermally enhanced stability in fluctuating bistable potentials.

Overdamped motion of Brownian particles in an asymmetric double-well potential driven by an additive nonequilibrium three-level noise and a thermal noise is considered. In the stationary regime, an exact formula for the mean occupancy of the metastable state is derived, and the phenomenon of enhancement of stability versus temperature is investigated. It is established that in a certain region of the system parameters the mean occupancy can be either multiply enhanced or suppressed by variations of temperature. We show that this effect is due to the involvement of different time scales in the problem. The necessary conditions for several different behaviors of the mean occupancy as a function of temperature are also discussed. The effect is more pronounced when the kurtosis of the three-level noise tends to -2 , i.e., in the case of dichotomous noise.