Focusing in Multiwell Potentials: Applications to Ion Channels

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We investigate out of equilibrium stationary distributions induced by a stochastic dichotomous noise on double and multi-well models for ion channels. Ion-channel dynamics is analyzed both through over-damped Langevin equations and master equations. As a consequence of the external stochastic noise, we prove a non trivial focusing effect, namely the probability distribution is concentrated only on one state of the multi-well model. We also show that this focusing effect, which occurs at physiological conditions, cannot be predicted by a simple master equation approach.