Noise Enhanced Stability

TL;DR

The paper reviews the noise enhanced stability phenomenon where white noise prolongs the lifetime of metastable states, discussing experimental, numerical, and theoretical insights across various physical systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of the physical systems exhibiting noise enhanced stability and discusses theoretical conditions and analytical results explaining the effect.

Findings

Noise can significantly increase the lifetime of metastable states.

Theoretical conditions for observing noise enhanced stability are identified.

Analytical expressions for mean first passage time are reviewed.

Abstract

The noise can stabilize a fluctuating or a periodically driven metastable state in such a way that the system remains in this state for a longer time than in the absence of white noise. This is the noise enhanced stability phenomenon, observed experimentally and numerically in different physical systems. After shortly reviewing all the physical systems where the phenomenon was observed, the theoretical approaches used to explain the effect are presented. Specifically the conditions to observe the effect: (a) in systems with periodical driving force, and (b) in random dichotomous driving force, are discussed. In case (b) we review the analytical results concerning the mean first passage time and the nonlinear relaxation time as a function of the white noise intensity, the parameters of the potential barrier, and of the dichotomous noise.