Fig. 3: Irreversible switching paths underlie the switching time asymmetry.
Mean forward (white) and backward (red) switching trajectories from lattice simulations projected onto the (N1, N−1)-plane. The lower triangle shows the fully irreversible limit (ΔG → ∞) with asymmetric switching paths, and the upper triangle shows the reversible limit (ΔG = 0) with symmetric paths. The background contours show the steady-state probability distribution. Active and inactive regions of state space are defined using fixed activity thresholds with constant 〈a〉 = (N1 − N−1)/N (gray dashed lines). Trajectories, the mean-field limit, for which the state-space is exactly the (N1, N−1)-plane, are qualitatively identical (see SI).
