Metastability in Reversible Diffusion Processes I: Sharp Asymptotics for Capacities and Exit Times

We develop a potential theoretic approach to the problem of metastability for reversible diffusion processes with generators of the form +rF ( )r on R or subsets of , where F is a smooth function with finitely many local minima. In analogy to previous work in discrete Markov chains, we show that metastable exit times from the attractive domains of the minima of F can be related, up to multiplicative errors that tend to one as # 0, to the capacities of suitably constructed sets. We show that...