We prove the hydrodynamic limit of a totally asymmetric zero range process on a torus with two lanes and randomly oriented edges. The asymmetry implies that the model is non-reversible. The random orientation of the edges is constructed in a bistochastic fashion which keeps the usual product distribution stationary for the quenched zero range model. It is also arranged to have no overall drift along the Z direction, which suggests diffusive scaling despite the asymmetry present in the dynamics. Indeed, using the relative entropy method, we prove the quenched hydrodynamic limit to be the heat equation with a diffusion coefficient depending on ergodic properties of the orientation of the edges.
The zero range process on this graph turns out to be non-gradient. Our main novelty is the introduction of a local equilibrium measure which decomposes the vertices of the graph into components of constant density. A clever choice of these components eliminates the non-gradient problems that normally arise during the hydrodynamic limit procedure.
In a randomly oriented graph containing vertices $x$ and $y$, denote by $\{x\to y\}$ the event that there is a directed path from $x$ to $y$. We study the correlation between the events $\{x\to y\}$ and $\{y\to z\}$ for a (large) oriented complete bipartite graph with orientation chosen uniformly at random. We classify the cases of positive and negative correlation respectively in terms of the relative proportions of the sizes of the color classes of the graph.
We study the recurrence behaviour of random walks on partially oriented honeycomb lattices. The vertical edges are undirected while the orientation of the horizontal edges is random: depending on their distribution, we prove a.s. transience in some cases, and a.s. recurrence in other ones. The results extend those obtained for the partially oriented square grid lattices (Campanino and Petritis (2003), Campanino and Petritis (2014)).
Random walks in random scenery are processes defined by $Z_n:=\sum_{k=1}^nξ_{X_1+...+X_k}$, where $(X_k,k\ge 1)$ and $(ξ_y,y\in\mathbb Z)$ are two independent sequences of i.i.d. random variables. We assume here that their distributions belong to the normal domain of attraction of stable laws with index $α\in (0,2]$ and $β\in (0,2]$ respectively. These processes were first studied by H. Kesten and F. Spitzer, who proved the convergence in distribution when $α\neq 1$ and as $n\to \infty$, of $n^{-δ}Z_n$, for some suitable $δ>0$ depending on $α$ and $β$. Here we are interested in the convergence…
Consider a randomly-oriented two dimensional Manhattan lattice where each horizontal line and each vertical line is assigned, once and for all, a random direction by flipping independent and identically distributed coins. A deterministic walk is then started at the origin and at each step moves diagonally to the nearest vertex in the direction of the horizontal and vertical lines of the present location. This definition can be generalized, in a natural way, to larger dimensions, but we mainly focus on the two dimensional case. In this context the process localizes on two vertices at all large …
Simple random walks on various types of partially horizontally oriented regular lattices are considered. The horizontal orientations of the lattices can be of various types (deterministic or random) and depending on the nature of the orientation the asymptotic behaviour of the random walk is shown to be recurrent or transient. In particular, for randomly horizontally oriented lattices the random walk is almost surely transient.
Given an undirected graph $G$, let us randomly orient $G$ by tossing independent (possibly biased) coins, one for each edge of $G$. Writing $a\rightarrow b$ for the event that there exists a directed path from a vertex $a$ to a vertex $b$ in such a random orientation, we prove that $\mathbb{P}(s\rightarrow a \cap s\rightarrow b) \ge \mathbb{P}(s\rightarrow a) \mathbb{P}(s\rightarrow b)$ for any three vertices $s$, $a$ and $b$ of $G$.
Consider any fixed graph whose edges have been randomly and independently oriented, and write $\{S \leadsto i\}$ to indicate that there is an oriented path going from a vertex $s \in S$ to vertex $i$. Narayanan (2016) proved that for any set $S$ and any two vertices $i$ and $j$, $\{S \leadsto i\}$ and $\{S \leadsto j\}$ are positively correlated. His proof relies on the Ahlswede-Daykin inequality, a rather advanced tool of probabilistic combinatorics. In this short note, I give an elementary proof of the following, stronger result: writing $V$ for the vertex set of the graph, for any source se…
In the randomly-oriented Manhattan lattice, every line in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is assigned a uniform random direction. We consider the directed graph whose vertex set is $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and whose edges connect nearest neighbours, but only in the direction fixed by the line orientations. Random walk on this directed graph chooses uniformly from the $d$ legal neighbours at each step. We prove that this walk is superdiffusive in two and three dimensions. The model is diffusive in four and more dimensions.
Suppose you can color $n$ \emph{biased} coins with $n$ colors, all coins having the same bias. It is forbidden to color both sides of a coin with the same color, but all other colors are allowed. Let $X$ be the number of different colors after a toss of the coins. We present a method to obtain an upper bound on a median of $X$. Our method is based on the analysis of the probability distribution of the number of vertices with even in-degree in graphs whose edges are given random orientations. Our analysis applies to the distribution of the number of vertices with odd degree in random sub-graphs…
Given a graph $G$, we consider the model where $G$ is given a random orientation by giving each edge a random direction. It is proven that for $a,b,s\in V(G)$, the events $\{s\to a\}$ and $\{s\to b\}$ are positively correlated. This correlation persists, perhaps unexpectedly, also if we first condition on $\{s\nto t\}$ for any vertex $t\neq s$. With this conditioning it is also true that $\{s\to b\}$ and $\{a\to t\}$ are negatively correlated. A concept of increasing events in random orientations is defined and a general inequality corresponding to Harris inequality is given. The results are o…
Random walks on general graphs play an important role in the understanding of the general theory of stochastic processes. Beyond their fundamental interest in probability theory, they arise also as simple models of physical systems. A brief survey of the physical relevance of the notion of random walk on both undirected and directed graphs is given followed by the exposition of some recent results on random walks on randomly oriented lattices. It is worth noticing that general undirected graphs are associated with (not necessarily Abelian) groups while directed graphs are associated with (not …
Suppose that you have $n$ colours and $m$ mutually independent dice, each of which has $r$ sides. Each dice lands on any of its sides with equal probability. You may colour the sides of each die in any way you wish, but there is one restriction: you are not allowed to use the same colour more than once on the sides of a die. Any other colouring is allowed. Let $X$ be the number of different colours that you see after rolling the dice. How should you colour the sides of the dice in order to maximize the Shannon entropy of $X$? In this article we investigate this question. We show that the entro…
In this paper, we introduce a random environment for the exclusion process in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ obtained by assigning a maximal occupancy to each site. This maximal occupancy is allowed to randomly vary among sites, and partial exclusion occurs. Under the assumption of ergodicity under translation and uniform ellipticity of the environment, we derive a quenched hydrodynamic limit in path space by strengthening the mild solution approach initiated in [39] and [21]. To this purpose, we prove, employing the technology developed for the random conductance model, a homogenization result in the form of…
This paper studies the hydrodynamic limit of a stochastic process describing the time evolution of a system with N neurons with mean-field interactions produced both by chemical and by electrical synapses. This system can be informally described as follows. Each neuron spikes randomly following a point process with rate depending on its membrane potential. At its spiking time, the membrane potential of the spiking neuron is reset to the value 0 and, simultaneously, the membrane potentials of the other neurons are increased by an amount of potential 1/N . This mimics the effect of chemical syna…
We prove a non-standard functional limit theorem for a two dimensional simple random walk on some randomly oriented lattices. This random walk, already known to be transient, has different horizontal and vertical fluctuations leading to different normalizations in the functional limit theorem, with a non-Gaussian horizontal behavior. We also prove that the horizontal and vertical components are not asymptotically independent.
We study the range of a planar random walk on a randomly oriented lattice, already known to be transient. We prove that the expectation of the range grows linearly, in both the quenched (for a.e. orientation) and annealed ("averaged") cases. We also express the rate of growth in terms of the quenched Green function and eventually prove a weak law of large numbers in the (non-Markovian) annealed case.
This paper summarizes results and some open problems about the large-scale and long-time behavior of asymmetric, disordered exclusion and zero-range processes. These processes have randomly chosen jump rates at the sites of the underlying lattice. The interesting feature is that for suitably distributed random rates there is a phase transition where the process behaves differently at high and low densities. Some of this distinction is visible on the hydrodynamic scale.
Randomized load balancing networks arise in a variety of applications, and allow for efficient sharing of resources, while being relatively easy to implement. We consider a network of parallel queues in which incoming jobs with independent and identically distributed service times are assigned to the shortest queue among a randomly chosen subset of $d$ queues, and leave the network on completion of service. Prior work on dynamical properties of this model has focused on the case of exponential service distributions. In this work, we analyze the more realistic case of general service distributi…
We study a stochastic particle system which is motivated from grain boundary coarsening in two-dimensional networks. Each particles lives on the positive real line and is labeled as belonging to either Species 1 or Species 2. Species 1 particles drift at unit speed toward the origin, while Species 2 particles do not move. When a particle in Species 1 hits the origin, it is removed, and a randomly selected particle mutates from Species 2 to Species 1. The process described is an example of a high-dimensional piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP), in which deterministic flow is punctuate…
This paper is a follow-up of the work initiated in [3], where it has been investigated the hydrodynamic limit of symmetric independent random walkers with birth at the origin and death at the rightmost occupied site. Here we obtain two further results: first we characterize the stationary states on the hydrodynamic time scale and show that they are given by a family of linear macroscopic profiles whose parameters are determined by the current reservoirs and the system mass. Then we prove the existence of a super-hyrdrodynamic time scale, beyond the hydrodynamic one. On this larger time scale t…
In this paper we study the hydrodynamic limit for a stochastic process describing the time evolution of the membrane potentials of a system of neurons with spatial dependency. We do not impose on the neurons mean-field type interactions. The values of the membrane potentials evolve under the effect of chemical and electrical synapses and leak currents. The system consists of $ε^{-2}$ neurons embedded in $[0,1)^2$, each spiking randomly according to a point process with rate depending on both its membrane potential and position. When neuron $i$ spikes, its membrane potential is reset to a resti…
Stochastic interface dynamics serve as mathematical models for diverse time-dependent physical phenomena: the evolution of boundaries between thermodynamic phases, crystal growth, random deposition... Interesting limits arise at large space-time scales: after suitable rescaling, the randomly evolving interface converges to the solution of a deterministic PDE (hydrodynamic limit) and the fluctuation process to a (in general non-Gaussian) limit process. In contrast with the case of $(1+1)$-dimensional models, there are very few mathematical results in dimension $(d+1), d\ge2$. As far as growth m…
We consider the one-dimensional asymmetric zero-range process starting from a step decreasing profile. In the hydrodynamic limit this initial condition leads to the rarefaction fan of the associated hydrodynamic equation. Under this initial condition and for totally asymmetric jumps, we show that the weighted sum of joint probabilities for second class particles sharing the same site is convergent and we compute its limit. For partially asymmetric jumps we derive the Law of Large Numbers for the position of a second class particle under the initial configuration in which all the positive sites…
