Kramers approximation particles

The first paper that was devoted to the escape problem in the context of the kinetics of chemical reactions and that presented approximate, but complete, analytic results was the paper by Kramers [11]. Kramers considered the mechanism of the transition process as noise-assisted reaction and used the Fokker-Planck equation for the probability density of Brownian particles to obtain several approximate expressions for the desired transition rates. The main approach of the Kramers method is the assumption that the probability current over a potential barrier is small and thus constant. This condition is valid only if a potential barrier is sufficiently high in comparison with the noise intensity. For obtaining exact timescales and probability densities, it is necessary to solve the Fokker-Planck equation, which is the main difficulty of the problem of investigating diffusion transition processes. 

In the standard overdamped version of the Kramers problem, the escape of a particle subject to a Gaussian white noise over a potential barrier is considered in the limit of low diffusivity—that is, where the barrier height AV is large in comparison to the diffusion constant K [14] (compare Fig.6). Then, the probability current over the potential barrier top near xmax is small, and the time change of the pdf is equally small. In this quasi-stationary situation, the probability current is approximately position independent. The temporal decay of the probability to find the particle within the potential well is then given by the exponential function [14, 22]... 

Velocity relaxation effects can be accounted for in an approximate fashion by going to a phase-space description in terms of Fokker-Planck or Langevin equations. Perhaps the best known study of this type is due to Kramers, who studied the escape of particles over potential barriers as a model for certain types of isomerization or dissociation reaction. 

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