Weakly asymmetric facilitated exclusion process

TL;DR

This paper studies a facilitated exclusion process with unique jump discontinuities, showing that in the weakly asymmetric limit, the particle density converges to a solution of a stochastic heat equation with multiplicative noise on a half-line.

Contribution

It establishes the convergence of the facilitated exclusion process to a multiplicative noise stochastic heat equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions, extending known ASEP results to this new setting.

Findings

Density profile develops a jump discontinuity.

Convergence to multiplicative noise stochastic heat equation.

Extension of ASEP convergence proofs to boundary conditions.

Abstract

We consider the facilitated exclusion process, an interacting particle system on the integer line where particles hop to one of their left or right neighbouring site only when the other neighbouring site is occupied by a particle. A peculiarity of this system is that, starting from the step initial condition, the density profile develops a downward jump discontinuity around the position of the first particle, unlike other exclusion processes such as the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP). In the weakly asymmetric regime, we show that the field of particle positions around the jump discontinuity converges to the solution of the multiplicative noise stochastic heat equation (i.e. the exponential of a solution to the KPZ equation) on a half-line subject to Dirichlet boundary condition, with initial condition given by the derivative of a Dirac delta function. We prove this result by reformulating the problem in terms of ASEP on a half-line with a boundary reservoir, for which we extend known proofs of convergence to deal with Dirichlet boundary condition and the very singular type of initial condition that arises in our case.