Non-normalizable quasi-equilibrium solution of the Fokker-Planck equation for nonconfining fields

Abstract

We investigate the overdamped Langevin motion for particles in a potential well that is asymptotically flat. When the potential well is deep compared to temperature, physical observables like the mean square displacement are essentially time-independent over a long time interval, the stagnation epoch. However the standard Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) distribution is non-normalizable, given that the usual partition function is divergent. For this regime, we have previously shown that a regularization of BG statistics allows the prediction of the values of dynamical and thermodynamical observables in the non-normalizable quasi-equilibrium state. In this work, based on the eigenfunction expansion of the time-dependent solution of the associated Fokker-Planck equation with free boundary conditions, we obtain an approximate time-independent solution of the BG form, valid for times which are long, but still short compared to the exponentially large escape time. The escaped particles follow a general free-particle statistics, where the solution is a an error function, shifted due to the initial struggle to overcome the potential well. With the eigenfunction solution of the Fokker-Planck equation in hand, we show the validity of the regularized BG statistics and how it perfectly describes the time-independent regime though the quasi-stationary state is non-normalizable.