Local thermal equilibrium for certain stochastic models of heat transport (Q288197)

The authors study the nonequilibrium steady states of a specific class of particle systems with stochastic interactions. The physical space of the considered models can be \(\mathbb{R}^d\) for any \(d\geq 1\). The authors begin with a rough model description. \(D\subset\mathbb{R}^d \) is a bounded domain with smooth boundary, and \(T\) is a prescribed temperature function on \(\partial D\). The authors consider \( \sim L^d\) particles performing independent random walks on \(D_L=\mathbb Z^d\cap LD\), where \(L\gg 1\) is a real number and \(LD\) is the dilation of \(D\). The authors assert the following two main results, holding in the infinite volume limit: (1) mean energy profiles with respect to nonequilibrium steady states when scaled back to \(D\) convergence to the unique solution \(u(x)\) of \[ \Delta u=0\text{ on }D, \quad u\mid_{\partial D}=T; \] (2) given any \(x\in D\), for sites located near \( xL\), marginal distributions of the nonequilibrium steady states tend to the equilibrium distribution at temperature \(u(x)\).