Towards a theory of transition paths (Q2506280)

The paper deals with some special problems related to rare but important transition events between long lived states as they occur in many physical systems. Two main theories are used to analyze these transitions: the transition state theory (TST) and the transition path sampling (TPS) technique. The present paper gives some contributions to the TPS, and constructs a (new) state-space based statistical theory of transition pathways. As a main result, one shows that various probability distributions on the reactive trajectories can be expressed in terms of the equilibrium distribution of the process and of the committor function.