Macroscopic fluctuation theory for stationary nonequilibrium states (Q1609182)

The authors formulate a macroscopic fluctuation theory for stationary nonequilibrium states which aims at describing the probability of a large macroscopic deviation from the behavior determined by the hydrodynamical description of the system. The theory is developed within the framework of Markov processes for interacting particle systems which (i) admit a hydrodynamical description in terms of a diffusion equation (with density-dependent diffusion matrix), (ii) which are connected to boundary reservoirs which appear on macroscopic scale as boundary conditions imposed on the hydrodynamical equation. A number of results of general nature are obtained in this setting which involves the adjoint hydrodynamics: a modification of the Onsager-Machlup theory (viz. such that a macroscopic fluctuation most likely follows the time-reversed trajectories according to the adjoint hydrodynamics), a nonlinear, nonequilibrium fluctuation-dissipation relation, an \(H\) theorem for the entropy which satisfies a Hamilton-Jacobi equation. It turns out that the adjoint hydrodynamics may be non-local. This is shown explicitly in two examples, the zero range process (local) and the symmetric exclusion process (nonlocal). The macroscopic entropy for the exclusion process is expressed in terms of the solution of an nonlinear ordinary differential equation.