Degenerate competing three-particle systems (Q2137057)

Under the rubric of ``competing particle systems'', the systems of three or more interacting particles that assign local characteristics to individual motions by rank have received considerable attention in recent years. A common feature of these researches is that particles of all ranks are assigned some strictly positive local variance, which smooths out the transition probabilities of particles for this nondegeneracy. The present paper studies the systems of such competing particles which are allowed to degenerate, in the sense that the variances assigned to one or two ranks can vanish. The paper considers the case only with three particles. As it was mentioned, even with this simplification, the range of behavior these systems can exhibit is quite rich. It is illustrated by studying in detail the construction and properties of three such systems -- respectively, in Sections 2, 3, and in an Appendix (Section A).