Metastability and topology - What can be read in a Fokker-Planck equation?

Statistical Physics and Complexity Group meeting

Metastability and topology - What can be read in a Fokker-Planck equation?

  • Event time: 2:00pm
  • Event date: 29th April 2008
  • Speaker: Julien Tailleur (Formerly School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
  • Location: Room 2511,

Event details

The long-time dynamics of a system with separated time-scales is best described by a set of metastable states and transitions in between. These dynamical structures are of great importance and their computation tricky, as one does not want to simulate complex systems for a long time. I will consider the Langevin dynamics of such a system and show how the metastable states are encoded in the Fokker-Planck equation whereas the transition between them can be read in a generalized Fokker-Planck equation, which contains all the topological informations relevant for the dynamics.