Generalized hydrodynamic limit for the box-ball system (Q2662964)

The box-ball system (BBS) was introduced by \textit{D. Takahashi} and \textit{J. Satsuma} [``A soliton cellular automaton'', J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 59, 3514--3519 (1990; \url{doi:10.1143/JPSJ.59.3514})] as a simple example of a discrete soliton system. The authors deal with a one-sided infinite version of the BBS, with configurations being represented by \(\eta=(\eta(x))_{x\in \mathbb{N}}\in \{0,1\}^{\mathbb{ N}}\), where \(\eta(x)=1\) means that there is a ball in the box at spatial location \(x\), and \(\eta(x)=0\) that the relevant box is empty. For any such configuration one defines the dynamics by introducing an auxiliary process \(W=(W(x))_{x\in \mathbb{Z}_{+}}\) taking values in \(\mathbb{Z}_{+}\), which is specified by setting \(W_{0}=0\), and, for \(x\geq 1, W(x)=W(x-1)+1\), if \(\eta(x)=1,W(x-1)\), if \(\eta(x)=0\) and \(W(x-1)=0\), \(W(x-1)-1\), if \(\eta(x)=0\) and \(W(x-1)>0\). The quantity \(W(x)\) represents the load transported by a `carrier' from \(x\) to \(x+1\) as it moves from left to right, picking up each ball as it passes, and dropping off a ball when it is holding at least one ball and sees an empty box. A single pass of the carrier from \(0\) to \(\infty \) gives one discrete-time step of the BBS dynamics. With this description, one obtains that the updated configuration \(T\eta=(T\eta(x))_{x\in \mathbb{N}}\) is given by \(T\eta(x)=\min\{1-\eta(x),W(x-1)\}\). Since subset configurations of the BBS allow solitonic compositions which can be related with generalized Hydrodynamic Limit, the authors studied their random initial configurations with distribution suitably distributed on the set \[ \Omega :=\left\{\eta =(\eta (x))_{x\in \mathbb{N}}\in \{0,1\}^{\mathbb{N}}: \overline{\lim}_{x\rightarrow \infty}\sum_{x^{\prime}\rightarrow \infty}(1-2\eta (x^{\prime}))=\infty \right\}, \] and proved their main result -- Theorem 1.1, generalizing the hydrodynamic limit for the rescaled empirical distributions of solitons of different sizes. In particular, the authors presented results, which concern generalized hydrodynamic limit for the integrated densities of solitons, giving a clear description of how the continuous system evolves in terms of the linear evolution of the solitons seen on their effective scale. Moreover, in addition to the generalized hydrodynamic limit results of the authors, a main contribution of this article is the introduction of the picture set out involving the functions \((\psi_{i})_{i}^{I}=1\) and \((\bar{ \psi}_{i})_{i}^{I},i=1\), as well as the explicit description elaborated for the scattering map and its inverse. The last theorem stated by the authors is related to their generalized hydrodynamic limit for integrated densities \(\bar{\psi}_{i}\in C^{I}\), defining \(\theta_{t}\circ \bar{\psi}_{i}\in C^{I}\) by setting \((\theta_{t}\circ \bar{\psi}_{i})_{i}(z):=\) \(\bar{\psi}_{i}((z-v_{i}t)\vee 0)\), where \(v_{i}:=i\), giving the free evolution of soliton densities, or equivalently, the temporal dynamics of soliton densities with respect to their effective distances. These results are well imbedded within the context of the dynamical study of soliton distributions, and more generally within the hydrodynamics of integrable systems like the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation, as the BBS of interest in this article can in fact be derived as an ultra-discretization of the discrete KdV equation, which is in turn a certain discretization of the KdV equation.