School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK.
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Georg-August-University Göttingen, 37077, Göttingen, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2023 Mar 8;13(1):3853. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-30577-0.
Noise-induced escape from metastable states governs a plethora of transition phenomena in physics, chemistry, and biology. While the escape problem in the presence of thermal Gaussian noise has been well understood since the seminal works of Arrhenius and Kramers, many systems, in particular living ones, are effectively driven by non-Gaussian noise for which the conventional theory does not apply. Here we present a theoretical framework based on path integrals that allows the calculation of both escape rates and optimal escape paths for a generic class of non-Gaussian noises. We find that non-Gaussian noise always leads to more efficient escape and can enhance escape rates by many orders of magnitude compared with thermal noise, highlighting that away from equilibrium escape rates cannot be reliably modelled based on the traditional Arrhenius-Kramers result. Our analysis also identifies a new universality class of non-Gaussian noises, for which escape paths are dominated by large jumps.
噪声诱导的亚稳态逃逸控制着物理、化学和生物学中大量的转变现象。虽然自 Arrhenius 和 Kramers 的开创性工作以来，人们已经很好地理解了存在热高斯噪声时的逃逸问题，但许多系统，特别是生命系统，实际上是由非高斯噪声驱动的，传统理论不适用于这种噪声。在这里，我们提出了一个基于路径积分的理论框架，该框架允许计算一类通用的非高斯噪声的逃逸率和最优逃逸路径。我们发现，非高斯噪声总是导致更有效的逃逸，并且与热噪声相比，逃逸率可以提高几个数量级，这突出表明，在远离平衡的情况下，逃逸率不能基于传统的 Arrhenius-Kramers 结果来可靠地建模。我们的分析还确定了一类新的非高斯噪声的普遍性，其中逃逸路径主要由大跳跃主导。
