Abstract
Our concern is with passage times and rate of approach to ergodicity for two types of temporally homogeneous processes, doubly bounded diffusion processes in one dimension, and birth-death processes on the finite lattice. The passage time problems associated with these processes are of considerable practical interest, but for many important cases, e.g., the Uhlenbeck-Ornstein process, only formal solutions such as Laplace transforms (cf. Darling and Siegert, 1953) have been given, with limited numerical potential.