title: Transition-event durations in one-dimensional activated processes.
abstract: Despite their importance in activated processes, transition-event durations--which are much shorter than first passage times--have not received a complete theoretical treatment. The authors therefore study the distribution rhob(t) of durations of transition events over a barrier in a one-dimensional system undergoing overdamped Langevin dynamics. The authors show that rhob(t) is determined by a Fokker-Planck equation with absorbing boundary conditions and obtain a number of results, including (i) the analytic form of the asymptotic short-time transient behavior, which is universal and independent of the potential function; (ii) the first nonuniversal correction to the short-time behavior leading to an estimate of a key physical time scale; (iii) following previous work, a recursive formulation for calculating, exactly, all moments of rhob based solely on the potential function-along with approximations for the distribution based on a small number of moments; and (iv) a high-barrier approximation to the long-time (t-->infinity) behavior of rhob(t). The authors also find that the mean event duration does not depend simply on the barrier-top frequency (curvature) but is sensitive to details of the potential. All of the analytic results are confirmed by transition-path-sampling simulations implemented in a novel way. Finally, the authors discuss which aspects of the duration distribution are expected to be general for more complex systems.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA.
authors.forename: Bin W
authors.initials: BW
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Jasnow
authors.forename: Daniel M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Zuckerman
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D008432:Mathematical Computing; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013269:Stochastic Processes