Bulk diffusion in a system with site disorder

We consider a system of random walks in a random environment interacting via exclusion. The model is reversible with respect to a family of disordered Bernoulli measures. Assuming some weak mixing conditions, it is shown that, under diffusive scaling, the system has a deterministic hydrodynamic limit which holds for almost every realization of the environment. The limit is a nonlinear diffusion equation with diffusion coefficient given by a variational formula. The model is nongradient and the method used is the ``long jump'' variation of the standard nongradient method, which is a type of renormalization. The proof is valid in all dimensions.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117906000000322 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Crossover distributions at the edge of the rarefaction fan

We consider the weakly asymmetric limit of simple exclusion process with drift to the left, starting from step Bernoulli initial data with $\rho_-<\rho_+$ so that macroscopically one has a rarefaction fan. We study the fluctuations of the process observed along slopes in the fan, which are given by the Hopf--Cole solution of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation, with appropriate initial data. For slopes strictly inside the fan, the initial data is a Dirac delta function and the one point distribution functions have been computed in [Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 64 (2011) 466-537] and [Nuclear Phys. B 834 (2010) 523-542]. At the edge of the rarefaction fan, the initial data is one-sided Brownian. We obtain a new family of crossover distributions giving the exact one-point distributions of this process, which converge, as $T\nearrow\infty$ to those of the Airy $\mathcal{A}_{2\to \mathrm{BM}}$ process. As an application, we prove moment and large deviation estimates for the equilibrium Hopf-Cole solution of KPZ. These bounds rely on the apparently new observation that the FKG inequality holds for the stochastic heat equation. Finally, via a Feynman-Kac path integral, the KPZ equation also governs the free energy of the continuum directed polymer, and thus our formula may also be interpreted in those terms.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOP725 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1003.044

KPZ equation, its renormalization and invariant measures

The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation is a stochastic partial differential equation which is ill-posed because the nonlinearity is marginally defined with respect to the roughness of the forcing noise. However, its Cole-Hopf solution, defined as the logarithm of the solution of the linear stochastic heat equation (SHE) with a multiplicative noise, is a mathematically well-defined object. In fact, Hairer [13] has recently proved that the solution of SHE can actually be derived through the Cole-Hopf transform of the solution of the KPZ equation with a suitable renormalization under periodic boundary conditions. This transformation is unfortunately not well adapted to studying the invariant measures of these Markov processes. The present paper introduces a different type of regularization for the KPZ equation on the whole line $\mathbb{R}$ or under periodic boundary conditions, which is appropriate from the viewpoint of studying the invariant measures. The Cole-Hopf transform applied to this equation leads to an SHE with a smeared noise having an extra complicated nonlinear term. Under time average and in the stationary regime, it is shown that this term can be replaced by a simple linear term, so that the limit equation is the linear SHE with an extra linear term with coefficient 1/24. The methods are essentially stochastic analytic: The Wiener-It\^o expansion and a similar method for establishing the Boltzmann-Gibbs principle are used. As a result, it is shown that the distribution of a two-sided geometric Brownian motion with a height shift given by Lebesgue measure is invariant under the evolution determined by the SHE on $\mathbb{R}$