Metastability in Reversible Diffusion Processes I: Sharp Asymptotics for Capacities and Exit Times

We develop a potential theoretic approach to the problem of metastability for reversible diffusion processes with generators of the form -\epsilon \Delta +\nabla F(\cdot)\nabla on \mathbb R^d or subsets of \mathbb R^d , where F is a smooth function with finitely many local minima. In analogy to prev... View More