Intermittency of activated events in single molecules: The reaction diffusion description

We generalize the reaction diffusion approach in order to calculate the hig her moments of the distribution of the population which characterize interm ittency and can be derived by statistical analysis of single molecule exper iments. We show the way the usual Poisson statistics is asymptotically appr oached with increasing barrier height for a reaction dependent on diffusing up an activation free energy barrier to a critical configuration. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-9606(99)51808-4].