Speeding up Brownian escape via intermediate finite potential barriers
arXiv:2509.03449 · doi:10.1063/5.0300737
Abstract
The mean first-passage time (MFPT) for a Brownian particle to surmount a potential barrier of height is a fundamental quantity governing a wide array of physical and chemical processes. According to the Arrhenius Law, the MFPT typically grows exponentially with increasing barrier height, reflecting the rarity of thermally activated escape events. In this work, we demonstrate that the MFPT can be significantly reduced by reshaping the original single-barrier potential into a structured energy landscape comprising multiple intermediate barriers of lower heights, while keeping the total barrier height unchanged. Furthermore, this counterintuitive result holds across both linear and nonlinear potential profiles. Our findings suggest that tailoring the energy landscape -- by introducing well-placed intermediate barriers -- can serve as an effective control strategy to accelerate thermally activated transitions. These predictions are amenable to experimental validation using optical trapping techniques.
References in corpus (23)
- Persistence and First-Passage Properties in Non-equilibrium Systems
- Holographic optical trapping
- Activated escape of a self-propelled particle from a metastable state
- First passage of a particle in a potential under stochastic resetting: a vanishing transition of optimal resetting rate
- Diffusion with resetting in a logarithmic potential
- Active escape dynamics: the effect of persistence on barrier crossing
- Geometric Brownian Motion under Stochastic Resetting: A Stationary yet Non-ergodic Process
- Escape dynamics of active particles in multistable potentials
- Colloidal transport through optical tweezer arrays
- Optimizing Brownian escape rates by potential shaping
- Dissociation rates from single-molecule pulling experiments under large thermal fluctuations or large applied force
- Fick-Jacobs description and first passage dynamics for diffusion in a channel under stochastic resetting
- Arrhenius law for interacting diffusive systems
- Resetting mediated navigation of active Brownian searcher in a homogeneous topography
- How a finite potential barrier decreases the mean first passage time
- Lévy noise-driven escape from arctan potential wells
- Long-term memory induced correction to Arrhenius law
- Kramers problem for a dimer: effect of noise correlations
- Emerging universality classes in thermally-assisted activation of interacting diffusive systems: A perturbative hydrodynamic approach
- Experimental measurement of mean transition path velocities of colloidal particles surmounting energy barriers
- Optimal barrier subdivision for Kramers' escape rate
- Optimization of escape kinetics by reflecting and resetting
- Speeding up the first-passage for subdiffusion by introducing a finite potential barrier