We study the large deviations of time-integrated observables of Markov diffusions that have perfectly reflecting boundaries. We discuss how the standard spectral approach to dynamical large deviations must be modified to account for such boundaries by imposing zero-current conditions, leading to Neumann or Robin boundary conditions, and how these conditions affect the driven process, which describes how large deviations arise in the long-time limit. The results are illustrated with the drifted Brownian motion and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process reflected at the origin. Other types of boundaries and applications are discussed.
We study the large deviations of current-type observables defined for Markov diffusion processes evolving in smooth bounded regions of $\mathbb{R}^d$ with reflections at the boundaries. We derive for these the correct boundary conditions that must be imposed on the spectral problem associated with the scaled cumulant generating function, which gives, by Legendre transform, the rate function characterizing the likelihood of current fluctuations. Two methods for obtaining the boundary conditions are presented, based on the diffusive limit of random walks and on the Feynman--Kac equation underlyi…
In this paper we develop a probabilistic model of single-particle diffusion in 1D multi-layered media by constructing a multi-layered version of so-called snapping out Brownian motion (BM). The latter sews together successive rounds of reflected BM, each of which is restricted to a single layer. Each round of reflected BM is killed when the local time at one end of the layer exceeds an independent, exponentially distributed random variable. (The local time specifies the amount of time a reflected Brownian particle spends in a neighborhood of a boundary.) The particle then immediately resumes r…
Diffusion in heterogeneous media partitioned by semi-permeable interfaces has a wide range of applications in the physical and life sciences, including gas permeation in soils, diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI), drug delivery, thermal conduction in composite media, synaptic receptor trafficking, and intercellular gap junctions. At the single particle level, diffusion across a semi-permeable interface can be formulated in terms of so-called snapping out Brownian motion (SNOBM). The latter sews together successive rounds of reflected BM, each of which is restricted to one side of the i…
We study the large deviations of the time-integrated current for a driven diffusion on the circle, often used as a model of nonequilibrium systems. We obtain the large deviation functions describing the current fluctuations using a Fourier-Bloch decomposition of the so-called tilted generator and also construct from this decomposition the effective (biased, auxiliary or driven) Markov process describing the diffusion as current fluctuations are observed in time. This effective process provides a clear physical explanation of the various fluctuation regimes observed. It is used here to obtain a…
We consider large deviations of empirical measures of diffusion processes. In a first part, we present conditions to obtain a large deviations principle (LDP) for a precise class of unbounded functions. This provides an analogue to the standard Cramér condition in the context of diffusion processes, which turns out to be related to a spectral gap condition for a Witten-Schrödinger operator. Secondly, we study more precisely the properties of the Donsker-Varadhan rate functional associated with the LDP. We revisit and generalize some standard duality results as well as a more original decomposi…
Fractional Brownian motion (FBM), a non-Markovian self-similar Gaussian stochastic process with long-ranged correlations, represents a widely applied, paradigmatic mathematical model of anomalous diffusion. We report the results of large-scale computer simulations of FBM in one, two, and three dimensions in the presence of reflecting boundaries that confine the motion to finite regions in space. Generalizing earlier results for finite and semi-infinite one-dimensional intervals, we observe that the interplay between the long-time correlations of FBM and the reflecting boundaries leads to strik…
The exponent of anomalous diffusion of virus in cytoplasm of a living cell is experimentally known to fluctuate depending on localized areas of the cytoplasm, indicating heterogeneity of diffusion. In a recent paper (Itto, 2012), a maximum-entropy-principle approach has been developed in order to propose an Ansatz for the statistical distribution of such exponent fluctuations. Based on this approach, here the deviation of the statistical distribution of the fluctuations from the proposed one is studied from the viewpoint of Einstein's theory of fluctuations (of the thermodynamic quantities). T…
We solve two problems related to the fluctuations of time-integrated functionals of Markov diffusions, used in physics to model nonequilibrium systems. In the first we derive and illustrate the appropriate boundary conditions on the spectral problem used to obtain the large deviations of current-type observables for reflected diffusions. For the second problem we study linear diffusions and obtain exact results for the generating function associated with linear additive, quadratic additive and linear current-type observables by using the Feynman-Kac formula. We investigate the long-time behavi…
We consider extended slow-fast systems of N interacting diffusions. The typical behavior of the empirical density is described by a nonlinear McKean-Vlasov equation depending on , the scaling parameter separating the time scale of the slow variable from the time scale of the fast variable. Its atypical behavior is encapsulated in a large N Large Deviation Principle (LDP) with a rate functional. We study the $Γ$-convergence of as $\rightarrow$ 0 and show it converges to the rate functional appearing in the Macroscopic Fluctuations Theory (MFT) for diffusive systems.
We apply macroscopic fluctuation theory to study the diffusion of a tracer in a one-dimensional interacting particle system with excluded mutual passage, known as single-file diffusion. In the case of Brownian point particles with hard-core repulsion, we derive the cumulant generating function of the tracer position and its large deviation function. In the general case of arbitrary inter-particle interactions, we express the variance of the tracer position in terms of the collective transport properties, viz. the diffusion coefficient and the mobility. Our analysis applies both for fluctuating…
For one-dimensional Jump-Drift and Jump-Diffusion processes converging towards some steady state, the large deviations of a long dynamical trajectory are described from two perspectives. Firstly, the joint probability of the empirical time-averaged density, of the empirical time-averaged current and of the empirical time-averaged jump-flow are studied via the large deviations at Level 2.5. Secondly, the joint probability of the empirical jumps and of the empirical excursions between consecutive jumps are analyzed via the large deviations at Level 2.5 for the alternate Markov chain that governs…
We consider quantum stochastic processes and discuss a level 2.5 large deviation formalism providing an explicit and complete characterisation of fluctuations of time-averaged quantities, in the large-time limit. We analyse two classes of quantum stochastic dynamics, within this framework. The first class consists of the quantum jump trajectories related to photon detection; the second is quantum state diffusion related to homodyne detection. For both processes, we present the level 2.5 functional starting from the corresponding quantum stochastic Schrödinger equation and we discuss connection…
We apply the macroscopic fluctuation theory to analyze the long-time statistics of the position of a tracer in the dense and the dilute limits of diffusive single-file systems. Our explicit results are about the corresponding large deviation functions for an initial step density profile with the fluctuating (annealed) and the fixed (quenched) initial conditions. These hydrodynamic results are applicable for a general single-file system and they confirm recent exact results obtained by microscopic solutions for specific model systems.
A particle with internal unobserved states diffusing in a force field will generally display effective advection-diffusion. The drift velocity is proportional to the mobility averaged over the internal states, or effective mobility, while the effective diffusion has two terms. One is of the equilibrium type and satisfies an Einstein relation with the effective mobility while the other is quadratic in the applied force. In this contribution we present two new methods to obtain these results, on the one hand using large deviation techniques, and on the other by a multiple-scale analysis, and com…
