Eur. Phys. J. B (2012) 85: 139
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-20924-6

Regular Article

Controlling the noise enhanced stability effect via noise recycling in a metastable system

¹ Department of Physics, Yunnan University, 650091 Kunming, P.R. China
² Department of Physics, Yuxi Normal University, 653100 Yuxi, P.R. China

^a e-mail: charlie@yxnu.net

Received: 14 November 2011
Received in final form: 28 January 2012
Published online: 26 April 2012

Abstract

We analyze the role of the delay time τ_d and the fraction ε of recycled noise on the enhancement of the mean first-passage time (MFPT) in a metastable system with recycled noise, generated by the superposition of a primary Gaussian noise source with a second component of constant delay. The results indicate that MFPT as a function of the noise intensity D shows either a non-monotonic behavior with a maximum or a divergent behavior, which is the identifying characteristic of the noise enhanced stability (NES) phenomenon. The increasing of τ_d or ε strengthens the NES effect for ε > 0. However, for ε < 0, there is a critical value of τ_d, below which we observe an increase of MFPT whose maximum goes to infinity, and above which the divergent behavior tends to disappear and MFPT versus D shows a transition from one peak to two peaks and eventually one peak as τ_d or  |ε|  increases. Moreover, we also discuss the effect of different initial conditions. These observations illustrate that the noise recycling may be used as an effective scheme for controlling the NES effect.