title: Escape rate of an active Brownian particle over a potential barrier.
abstract: We study the dynamics of an active Brownian particle with a nonlinear friction function located in a spatial cubic potential. For strong but finite damping, the escape rate of the particle over the spatial potential barrier shows a nonmonotonic dependence on the noise intensity. We relate this behavior to the fact that the active particle escapes from a limit cycle rather than from a fixed point and that a certain amount of noise can stabilize the sojourn of the particle on this limit cycle.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany. burada@pks.mpg.de
authors.forename: P S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Burada
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lindner
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004058:Diffusion; D004574:Electromagnetic Fields; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular; D053758:Nanoparticles / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000528:radiation effects / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D010316:Particle Size