Decay to the nonequilibrium steady state of the thermal diffusion in a tilted periodic potential

We investigate the phenomenon of asymptotic decay towards the nonequilibrium steady state of the thermal diffusion in the presence of a tilted periodic potential. The parameter dependence of the decay rate is revealed by investigating the Fokker-Planck (FP) equation in the low temperature case under the spatially periodic boundary condition (PBC). We apply the WKB method to the associated Schrodinger equation. While eigenvalues of the non-Hermitian FP operator are complex in general, in a small tilting case the imaginary parts of the eigenvalues are almost vanishing. Then the Schrodinger equation is solved with PBC. The decay rate is analyzed in the context of quantum tunneling through a triple-well effective periodic potential. In a large tilting case, the imaginary parts of the eigenvalues of the FP operator are crucial. We apply the complex-valued WKB method to the Schrodinger equation with the absorbing boundary condition, finding that the decay rate saturates and depends only on the temperature, the potential periodicity and the viscous constant. The intermediate tilting case is also explored. The analytic results agree well with the numerical data for a wide range of tilting. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.