Dirichlet’s and Thomson’s principles for non-selfadjoint elliptic operators with application to non-reversible metastable diffusion processes

We present two variational formulae for capacity in the context of non-selfadjoint elliptic operators. The minimizers of these variational problems are expressed as solutions of boundary-value elliptic equations. We use these principles to provide a sharp estimate for the transition times between two different wells for non-reversible diffusion processes. This estimate permits us to describe the metastable behavior of the system.