Exact solutions in multi-species exclusion processes

Abstract

The exclusion process has been the default model for the transportation phenomenon. One fundamental issue is to compute the exact formulae analytically. Such formulae enable us to obtain the limiting distribution through asymptotics analysis, and they also allow us to uncover relationships between different processes, and even between very different systems. Extensive results have been reported for single-species systems, but few for multi-component systems and mixtures. In this thesis, we focus on multi-species exclusion processes, and propose two approaches for exact solutions.

The first one is due to duality, which is defined by a function that co-varies in time with respect to the evolution of two processes. It relates physical quantities, such as the particle flow, in a system with many particles to one with few particles, so that the quantity of interest in the first process can be calculated explicitly via the second one. Historically, published dualities have mostly been found by trial and error. Only very recently have attempts been made to derive these functions algebraically. We propose a new method to derive dualities systematically, by exploiting the mathematical structure provided by the deformed quantum Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation. With this method, we not only recover the well-known self-duality in single-species asymmetric simple exclusion processes (ASEPs), and also obtain the duality for two-species ASEPs.

Solving the master equation is an alternative method. We consider an exclusion process with 2 species particles: the AHR (Arndt-Heinzl-Rittenberg) model and give a full derivation of its Green's function via coordinate Bethe ansatz. Hence using the Green's function, we obtain an integral formula for its joint current distributions, and then study its limiting distribution with step type initial conditions. We show that the long-time behaviour is governed by a product of the Gaussian and the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE) Tracy-Widom distributions, which is related to the random matrix theory. Such result agrees with the prediction made by the nonlinear fluctuating hydrodynamic theory (NLFHD). This is the first analytic verification of the prediction of NLFHD in a multi-species system.