Diffusion in the presence of cells with semi-permeable membranes

Abstract

We consider processes that coincide with a given diffusion process except on the boundaries of a finite collection of domains. The behavior on each of the boundaries is asymmetric: the process is much more likely to enter the interior of the domain than to enter the interior of its complement, with a small parameter controlling the trapping mechanism. We describe the limiting behavior of the processes. In particular, if the parameters controlling the boundary behavior have different orders of magnitude for different domains or if the domains are nested, metastable distributions between the trapping regions are described.