Escape through an unstable limit cycle driven by multiplicative colored non-Gaussian and additive white Gaussian noises.

In a previous paper [Bag and Hu, Phys. Rev. E 73, 061107 (2006)], we studied the mean lifetime (MLT) for the escape of a Brownian particle through an unstable limit cycle driven by multiplicative colored Gaussian and additive Gaussian white noises and found resonant activation (RA) behavior. In the present paper we switch from Gaussian to non-Gaussian multiplicative colored noise. We find that in the RA phenomenon, the minimum appears at a smaller noise correlation time (tau) for non-Gaussian noises compared to Gaussian noises in the plot of MLT vs tau for a fixed noise variance; the same plot for a given noise strength increases linearly and the increasing rate is smaller for non-Gaussian noises than for the Gaussian noises; the plot of logarithm of inverse of MLT vs inverse of the strength of additive noise is Arrhenius-like for Gaussian colored noise and it becomes similar to the quantum-Kramers rate if the multiplicative noise is non-Gaussian.