Effect of colored noise on heteroclinic orbits.

The dynamics of a weakly dissipative Hamiltonian system submitted to stochastic perturbations has been investigated by means of asymptotic methods. The probability of noise-induced separatrix crossing, which drastically changes the fate of the system, is derived analytically in the case where noise is an additive Kubo-Anderson process. This theory shows how the geometry of the separatrix, as well as the noise intensity and correlation time, affect the statistics of crossing. Results can be applied to a wide variety of systems, and are valid in the limit where the noise correlation time scale is much smaller than the time scale of the undisturbed Hamiltonian dynamics.