Theory Club

Nothing says "I love you" like the WKB approximation, so to mark Valentine's Day I shall discuss its application to finding the stationary distribution of some stochastic process in the large system-size limit. I will follow closely the recent paper by A J Black and A J McKane "WKB calculation of an epidemic outbreak distribution", J Stat Mech 2011 P12006. Note this is something different to the van Kampen system size expansion, though they seem to be related.