SOME STOCHASTIC PHENOMENA IN A DRIVEN DOUBLE-WELL SYSTEM

We study the overdamped motion of a Brownian; particle in a driven dou ble-well system to understand various physical phenomena observed expe rimentally, These phenomena include; hysteresis, stochastic resonance. and net unidirectional motion in a symmetric periodic system., We arg ue that the area of the hysteresis loop so defined is a good measure o f synchronization (with respect to the applied field) of passages betw een the two wells., We find that stochastic resonance may be relevant even in case of large-amplitude driving field due to a recently discov ered phenomena of noise-induced stability of unstable states. We try t o find the relation between some of these apparently different phenome na.