Distribution of escape times for a deterministically driven bistable system

In this paper, we analyze the sequence of escape times for a particle in a symmetric double-well potential coupled to a chain of monodimensional oscillators and we find that, in some range of energies, the probability of escape exhibits the multimodal form that is characteristic of bistable systems driven by a periodic signal embedded in noise. We identify two different modes contributing to the overall hopping dynamics of the particle, each one having a definite dependence on the energy of the chain. Those findings suggest a model for internal fluctuations that could be useful in the study of some problems of interest in physics and biology.