  The thermal activation process by which a system passes from one local energy
minimum to another is a recurring motif in physics, chemistry, and biology. For
instance, biopolymer chains are typically modeled in terms of energy
landscapes, with folded and unfolded conformations represented by two distinct
wells separated by a barrier. The rate of transfer between wells depends
primarily on the height of the barrier, but it also depends on the details of
the shape of the landscape along the trajectory. We consider the case of bias
due to an external force, analogous to the pulling force applied in optical
tweezer experiments on biopolymers. Away from the Arrhenius-law limit and well
out of equilibrium, somewhat idiosyncratic behavior might be expected. Instead,
we identify universal behavior of the biased activated-barrier-crossing process
and demonstrate that data collapse onto a universal curve can be achieved for
simulated data over a wide variety of energy landscapes having barriers of
different height and shape and for loading rates spanning many orders of
magnitude.
