Stochastic resonance in dissipative drift motion

•In the noiseless model, the dissipation destroys the islands chains and the chaotic sea.•Our results show that the noise produces significant alterations to the escape time distribution.•We observe that the escape times can be maximal when the noise intensity reaches a finite level in which the phenomenon of stochastic resonance takes place.•The noise intensity value for the stochastic resonance to occur depends on the dissipation parameter according to a power-law relationship.

We study a simple model of drift waves that describes the particle transport in magnetised plasmas. In particular, we focus our attention on the effects of noise on a dissipative drift wave model. In the noiseless case, the relationship between the escape time and the damping term obeys a power-law scaling. In this work, we show that peaks in the escape time are enhanced for certain values of the noise intensity, when noise is added in the dissipative drift motion. This enhancement occurs in the situation where stochastic resonance (SR) appears. We also observe that the noise produces significant alterations to the escape time distribution. This way, we expect this work to be useful for a better understanding of drift wave models in the presence of noise, since noise is a natural ingredient in the environment of this kind of physical problems.