in Instabilities and Nonequilibrium Structures III, Eds. E. Tirapegui and W. Zeller, Kluwer Academic Publishers (1991). p. 143-155.
The description of dynamical processes in terms of passage time distributions is generally advocated. Two specific situations are considered, transient relaxation at a pitchfork bifurcation and transport in disordered chains. The scaling description at a supercritical bifurcation is reviewed. For the subcritical case an approximation for the stochastic paths allowing the calculation of the passage time distribution is presented. In the case of disordered chains, a characterization of strong disorder is given in terms of the long tail of the passage time distribution to escape from a finite interval.
Pere Colet e-mail: [email protected] http://www.imedea.uib.es/~pere/