Low temperature asymptotics for Quasi-Stationary Distributions in a bounded domain

Abstract: We analyze the low temperature asymptotics of the quasi-stationary distribution associated with the overdamped Langevin dynamics (a.k.a. the Einstein-Smoluchowski diffusion equation) in a bounded domain. This analysis is useful to rigorously prove the consistency of an algorithm used in molecular dynamics (the hyperdynamics), in the small temperature regime. More precisely, we show that the algorithm is exact in terms of state-to-state dynamics up to exponentially small factor in the limit of small temperature. The proof is based on the asymptotic spectral analysis of associated Dirichlet and Neumann realizations of Witten Laplacians. In order to cover a reasonably large range of applications, the usual assumptions that the energy landscape is a Morse function has been relaxed as much as possible.