Duality and hidden symmetries in interacting particle systems (Q2391036)

Duality is a technique developed in the probabilistic literature that allows to obtain elegant and general solutions of some problems in interacting particle systems. This property might be also useful in the context of transport models and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics where exist the long-range correlations. In article the authors show a general relation between duality and symmetries of the generator in the context of Markov processes (in discrete and continuous setting). Starting from the generalities presented in Section 2.1 we are introduced to the notions of duality and self-duality (as a particular case of duality) with the theorem that shows that the self-duality functions and symmetries are in one-to-one correspondence provided that used matrices are similar. In Section 3 one can find a series of examples (namely: the symmetric exclusion (subsec. 3.1 and 3.2), the Dual-BEP - it's a process that can be viewed as a ``bosonic'' analogue of the Symmetric Exclusion Processes (SEP) -- see subsec. 3.3, independent random walks (subsec. 3.4 and 3.5)) that show how the duality and the self-duality can be established (with the use of theorems given in the previous section). Next (Section 4) the detailed analysis of the \(2j\)-SEP processes is given (the processes with at most \(2j\) particles per site, on a graph \(S\)) also with limiting processes where \(j\rightarrow\infty\). In the next two sections the study of the Brownian momentum process (BMP) and the Brownian energy processes (BEP) is given with the analysis of reversible measures of the dual processes. For BMP the authors recover duality in the context of given in the article theorems and explain the duality function. The study of BEP is done starting from the generator and the explanation of the existing duality. In Section 6.3 the authors also introduced the Kipnis-Marchioro-Presutti (KMP) model that arises by an instantaneous thermalization limit (the original term given by the authors) of the energy process associated to a large family of models of interacting diffusions (they are called Brownian energy processes with the \(\text{SU}(1,1)\) symmetry). The authors also treat in details the case where the system is in contact with reservoirs and the dual process becomes absorbing.