Microscopic concavity and fluctuation bounds in a class of deposition processes

We prove fluctuation bounds for the particle current in totally asymmetric zero range processes in one dimension with nondecreasing, concave jump rates whose slope decays exponentially. Fluctuations in the characteristic directions have order of magnitude $t^{1/3}$. This is in agreement with the expectation that these systems lie in the same KPZ universality class as the asymmetric simple exclusion process. The result is via a robust argument formulated for a broad class of deposition-type processes. Besides this class of zero range processes, hypotheses of this argument have also been verified in the authors' earlier papers for the asymmetric simple exclusion and the constant rate zero range processes, and are currently under development for a bricklayers process with exponentially increasing jump rates.Comment: Improved after Referee's comments: we added explanations and changed some parts of the text. 50 pages, 1 figur

A pedestrian's view on interacting particle systems, KPZ universality, and random matrices

These notes are based on lectures delivered by the authors at a Langeoog seminar of SFB/TR12 "Symmetries and universality in mesoscopic systems" to a mixed audience of mathematicians and theoretical physicists. After a brief outline of the basic physical concepts of equilibrium and nonequilibrium states, the one-dimensional simple exclusion process is introduced as a paradigmatic nonequilibrium interacting particle system. The stationary measure on the ring is derived and the idea of the hydrodynamic limit is sketched. We then introduce the phenomenological Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation and explain the associated universality conjecture for surface fluctuations in growth models. This is followed by a detailed exposition of a seminal paper of Johansson that relates the current fluctuations of the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) to the Tracy-Widom distribution of random matrix theory. The implications of this result are discussed within the framework of the KPZ conjecture.Comment: 52 pages, 4 figures; to appear in J. Phys. A: Math. Theo