Computation of current cumulants for small nonequilibrium systems (Q2391039)

In the paper a systematic algorithm for the exact computation of the current cumulants in stochastic nonequilibrium systems was analyzed. The presented algorithm is based on an identity between current and activity fluctuations, connecting the time-antisymmetric with the time-symmetric fluctuation sector as is typical for a dynamical large deviation theory in nonequilibrium systems. The authors concentrated on the mechanical aspect of the method and emphasize the algorithm rather than its detailed numerical implementation focusing on relatively small systems. The main novelty of their work is: (I) The use of nonequilibrium version of the Rayleigh-Schrödinger (RS) expansion to obtain a systematic cumulant expansion for the current statistics, generalizing the approach presented in the literature by C. Flindt and his cooperators to include the joint fluctuations of different currents. This can be useful for the numerical evaluation of higher-order cumulants as finite-difference calculations generate more numerical errors. The details can be found in Section 2 where the analysis of current fluctuations is presented basing on a continuous time Markov jump process. In this section we also have a general identity (given by the equation (8)), which shows that the current fluctuations can be expressed in terms of occupation time fluctuations in a tilted path-space measure. The formulae for the first, second and higher-order cumulants are also presented. (II) A thermodynamic interpretation of the numerical procedure in terms of the time-symmetric sector of nonequilibrium fluctuations that was presented in Section 4. There we can find that the traffic, which expresses a time-symmetric kind of dynamical activity over the given bond, adds a time-symmetric aspect to the evaluation of the dynamical activity. (III) The illustration of procedures for a boundary driven Kawasaki dynamics. It is given in Section 3 by a generalization of the symmetric exclusion process (SEP), in which the particles are also interacting with their nearest neighbors at a finite temperature \(\beta^{-1}\). The calculation has been done for a relatively small system where the number of sites \(N=8\), but the authors explain their choice making a comment in Appendix C about the size dependence of the algorithm. There were calculated the first four cumulants of the current distribution as a function of \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\), i.e. the parameters that reflects the particles chemical potential. In the Appendixes the normality of the Markov generator, the algorithm for the Rayleigh-Schrödinger expansion and the numerical scheme were presented.