Noisy heteroclinic networks

Abstract

We consider a white noise perturbation of dynamics in the neighborhood of a heteroclinic network. We show that under the logarithmic time rescaling the diffusion converges in distributon in a special topology to a piecewise constant process that jumps between saddle points along the heteroclinic orbits of the network. We also obtain precise asymptotics for the exit measure for a domain containing the starting point of the diffusion.