The motion of a second class particle for the tasep starting from a decreasing shock profile

We prove a strong law of large numbers for the location of the second class particle in a totally asymmetric exclusion process when the process is started initially from a decreasing shock. This completes a study initiated in Ferrari and Kipnis [Ann. Inst. H. Poincare Probab. Statist. 13 (1995) 143-154].Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051605000000151 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

On a link between a species survival time in an evolution model and the Bessel distributions

We consider a stochastic model for species evolution. A new species is born at rate lambda and a species dies at rate mu. A random number, sampled from a given distribution F, is associated with each new species at the time of birth. Every time there is a death event, the species that is killed is the one with the smallest fitness. We consider the (random) survival time of a species with a given fitness f. We show that the survival time distribution depends crucially on whether ff_c where f_c is a critical fitness that is computed explicitly.Comment: 13 page

A stochastic model of evolution

We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event then the type that is killed is the one with the smallest fitness. We show that there is a sharp phase transition when the birth probability is larger than the death probability. The set of species with fitness higher than a certain critical value approach an uniform distribution. On the other hand all the species with fitness less than the critical disappear after a finite (random) time.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, TeX, Added references, To appear in Markov Processes and Related Field

Convergence to the maximal invariant measure for a zero-range process with random rates

We consider a one-dimensional totally asymmetric nearest-neighbor zero-range process with site-dependent jump-rates - an environment. For each environment p we prove that the set of all invariant measures is the convex hull of a set of product measures with geometric marginals. As a consequence we show that for environments p satisfying certain asymptotic property, there are no invariant measures concentrating on configurations with critical density bigger than $\rho^*(p)$, a critical value. If $\rho^*(p)$ is finite we say that there is phase-transition on the density. In this case we prove that if the initial configuration has asymptotic density strictly above $\rho^*(p)$, then the process converges to the maximal invariant measure.Comment: 19 pages, Revised versio

Hydrodynamics for totally asymmetric kk-step exclusion processes

18 pages, Technical ReportWe describe the hydrodynamic behavior of the $k$-step exclusion process. Since the flux appearing in the hydrodynamic equation for this particle system is neither convex nor concave, the set of possible solutions include in addition to entropic shocks and continuous solutions those with contact discontinuities. We finish with a limit theorem for the tagged particle