Correlations in the sequence of residence times.

Sequences of residence times (RTs) associated with the escape from metastable states are observed in many fields. Here we study analytically and numerically the correlations among RTs for a bistable stochastic system driven by dichotomous noise. Our theory predicts an oscillatory behavior of the correlations with respect to the lag between RTs. Correlations vanish at all lags if the switching rate matches the hopping rate of the unperturbed system. It is also shown that RT correlations may reveal features of the driving which are not present in the single-RT statistics.