Aging through hierarchical coalescence in the East model (Q661322)

The authors present a rigorous analysis of the low temperature non-equilibrium dynamics of the East model. The East model is a special example of a one dimensional oriented kinetically constrained particle model with initial distribution different from the reversible one and four times smaller than the global relaxation time. In the limit of zero temperature, the authors prove that the density of vacancies, the persistence function and the two-time autocorrelation function behave like staircase functions with several plateaux. They also provide a sharp description of the statistics of the domain length as a function of time, a domain being the interval between two consecutive vacancies. When the initial process has finite means, the obtained results can be related to previous models based on a product Bernoulli measure. But when the initial distribution is in the attraction domain of the \(\alpha\)-stable law, the low temperature dynamics of the East model is well described by hierarchical coalescence process proposed by Faggionato et al. The paper is divided into seven sections. After an introduction, the definition and main results of the East process are presented (Section 2). In Section 3, the authors give an introduction to the hierarchical coalescence process and its connection with the East process. The next section delivers an application for the low temperature East process; the approximation by the hierarchical coalescence process, which is crucial, is proven in Section 5, where one can also find the proofs of Theorems 3.7 and 3.8 which are basic for the considered paper. Section 6 presents also two proofs for two other important theorems, whereas in Section 7, a presentation of some extensions of the results obtained in this paper are given, namely, the East process with renewal stationary initial distribution and the East process with exchangeable initial distribution.