This monograph provides a concise presentation of a mathematical approach to metastability, a wide-spread phenomenon in the dynamics of non-linear systems - physical, chemical, biological or economic - subject to the action of temporal random forces typically referred to as noise, based on potential theory of reversible Markov processes.

The authors shed new light on the metastability phenomenon as a sequence of visits of the path of the process to different metastable sets, and focuses on the precise analysis of the respective hitting probabilities and hitting times of these...