PROBABILITY-DISTRIBUTION OF THE RESIDENCE TIMES IN PERIODICALLY FLUCTUATING METASTABLE SYSTEMS

We investigate experimentally and numerically the probability distribu tion of the residence times in periodically fluctuating metastable sys tems. The experiments are performed in a physical metastable system wh ich is the series of a biasing resistor with a tunnel diode in paralle l to a capacitor. The numerical simulations are performed in an overda mped model system with a time-dependent potential. We investigate both the cases where the system is deterministically overall-stable and ov erall-unstable. In the overall-unstable regime, the experimental and t he numerically investigated systems show noise enhanced stability in t he presence of a finite amount of noise. The determined P(T) is multi- peaked with an exponentially decaying envelop. We note that the shape of the nth peak in the P(T) is roughly fitted by a Gaussian function w ith standard deviation independent of n.