We consider the thermodynamic potential describing the macroscopic fluctuation of the current and local energy of a general class of Hamiltonian models including aerogels. We argue that this potential is neither analytic nor strictly convex, a property that should be expected in general but missing from models studied in the literature. This opens the possibility of describing in terms of a thermodynamic potential non-equilibrium phase transitions in a concrete physical context. This special behaviour of the thermodynamic potential is caused by the fact that the energy current is carried by particles which may have arbitrary low speed with sufficiently large probability.
The Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory is an effective framework to describe transports and their fluctuations in classical out-of-equilibrium diffusive systems. Whether the Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory may be extended to the quantum realm and which form this extension may take is yet terra incognita but is a timely question. In this short introductory review, I discuss possible questions that a quantum version of the Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory could address and how analysing Quantum Simple Exclusion Processes yields pieces of answers to these questions.
We study a micro and macroscopic model for chemical reactions with feedback between reactions and temperature of the solute. The first result concerns the quasipotential as the large-deviation rate of the microscopic invariant measure. The second result is an application of modern Onsager-Machlup theory to the pathwise large deviations, in case the system is in detailed balance. The third result is an application of macroscopic fluctuation theory to the reaction flux large deviations, in case the system is in complex balance.
The fluctuations of macroscopic observables in quantum systems which are in a nonequilibrium steady state are studied rigorously in the thermodynamic limit. In particular, the nonequilibrium steady state (NESS) of a quantum spin system that is composed of two infinite reservoirs at different temperatures coupled in a bounded region is considered. Under suitable assumptions on the interaction and the asymptotics of the fluctuations, a nonequilibrium central limit theorem for the fluctuations of the NESS expectation value of the empirical average of observables is proven by showing the analytici…
We present the first exact solution for the time dependent equations of the macroscopic fluctuation theory (MFT) for the symmetric simple exclusion process by combining a generalization of the canonical Cole-Hopf transformation with the inverse scattering method. For the step initial condition with two densities, the associated Riemann-Hilbert problem is solved to determine exactly the optimal density profile and the response field which produce a required fluctuation, both at initial and final times. The large deviation function of the current is derived and coincides with the formula obtaine…
We study a simple transport model driven out of equilibrium by reservoirs at the boundaries, corresponding to the hydrodynamic limit of the symmetric simple exclusion process. We show that a nonlocal transformation of densities and currents maps the large deviations of the model into those of an open, isolated chain satisfying detailed balance, where rare fluctuations are the time reversals of relaxations. We argue that the existence of such a mapping is the immediate reason why it is possible for this model to obtain an explicit solution for the large-deviation function of densities through e…
We introduce a multi-species generalization of the symmetric simple exclusion process with open boundaries. This model possesses the property of being integrable and appears as physically relevant because the boundary conditions can be interpreted as the interaction with particles reservoirs with fixed densities of each species. The system is driven out-of-equilibrium by these reservoirs. The steady state is analytically computed in a matrix product form. This algebraic structure allows us to obtain exact expressions for the mean particle currents and for the one and two-point correlation func…
We study the crossover from the macroscopic fluctuation theory (MFT) which describes 1D stochastic diffusive systems at late times, to the weak noise theory (WNT) which describes the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation at early times. We focus on the example of the diffusion in a time-dependent random field, observed in an atypical direction which induces an asymmetry. The crossover is described by a non-linear system which interpolates between the derivative and the standard non-linear Schrodinger equations in imaginary time. We solve this system using the inverse scattering method for mixed-t…
Current fluctuations for the boundary-driven zero-range process on graphs: microscopic versus macroscopic approach and a theory of non-reversible resistor-like networks
We study the energy diffusion in a chain of anharmonic oscillators where the Hamiltonian dynamics is perturbed by a local energy conserving noise. We prove that under diffusive rescaling of space-time, energy fluctuations diffuse and evolve following an infinite dimensional linear stochastic differential equation driven by the linearized heat equation. We also give variational expressions for the thermal diffusivity and some upper and lower bounds.
We introduce and study the inhomogeneous exponential jump model - an integrable stochastic interacting particle system on the continuous half line evolving in continuous time. An important feature of the system is the presence of arbitrary spatial inhomogeneity on the half line which does not break the integrability. We completely characterize the macroscopic limit shape and asymptotic fluctuations of the height function (= integrated current) in the model. In particular, we explain how the presence of inhomogeneity may lead to macroscopic phase transitions in the limit shape such as shocks or…
Our recent interest is focused on establishing the necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee a long-term stable evolution of both natural and artificial systems. Two necessary conditions, called global and local boundedness, are that a system stays stable if and only if the amount and the rate of exchange of energy and/or matter currently involved in any transition do not exceed the thresholds of stability of the system. The relationship between the local and global boundedness and the stability of the system introduces two new general properties of the state space and the motion in i…
We consider a planar Coulomb gas in which the external potential is generated by a smeared uniform background of opposite-sign charge on a disc. This model can be seen as a two-dimensional Wigner jellium, not necessarily charge neutral, and with particles allowed to exist beyond the support of the smeared charge. The full space integrability condition requires low enough temperature or high enough total smeared charge. This condition does not allow at the same time, total charge neutrality and determinantal structure. The model shares similarities with both the complex Ginibre ensemble and the…
Understanding the physics of non-equilibrium systems remains as one of the major open questions in statistical physics. This problem can be partially handled by investigating macroscopic fluctuations of key magnitudes that characterise the non-equilibrium behaviour of the system of interest; their statistics, associated structures and microscopic origin. During the last years, some new general and powerful methods have appeared to delve into fluctuating behaviour that have drastically changed the way to address this problem in the realm of diffusive systems: macroscopic fluctuation theory (MFT…
Dissipative processes abound in most areas of sciences and can often be abstractly written as $\partial_t z = K(z) δS(z)/δz$, which is a gradient flow of the entropy $S$. Although various techniques have been developed to compute the entropy, the calculation of the operator $K$ from underlying particle models is a major long-standing challenge. Here, we show that discretizations of diffusion operators $K$ can be numerically computed from particle fluctuations via an infinite-dimensional fluctuation-dissipation relation, provided the particles are in local equilibrium with Gaussian fluctuations…
We contribute an extension of large-deviation results obtained in [N.J.B. Aza, J.-B. Bru, W. de Siqueira Pedra, A. Ratsimanetrimanana, J. Math. Pures Appl. 125 (2019) 209] on conductivity theory at atomic scale of free lattice fermions in disordered media. Disorder is modeled by (i) a random external potential, like in the celebrated Anderson model, and (ii) a nearest-neighbor hopping term with random complex-valued amplitudes. In accordance with experimental observations, via the large deviation formalism, our previous paper showed in this case that quantum uncertainty of microscopic electric…
