We investigate the optimal alignment of two independent random sequences of length n. We provide a polynomial lower bound for the probability of the optimal alignment to be macroscopically non-unique. We furthermore establish a connection between the transversal fluctuation and macroscopic non-uniqueness.
The brownian web (BW), which developed from the work of Arratia and then Tóth and Werner, is a random collection of paths (with specified starting points) in one plus one dimensional space–time that arises as the scaling limit of the discrete web (DW) of coalescing simple random walks. Two recently introduced extensions of the BW, the brownian net (BN) constructed by Sun and Swart, and the dynamical brownian web (DyBW) proposed by Howitt and Warren, are (or should be) scaling limits of corresponding...
We consider the Fluctuation Dissipation Theorem (FDT) of statistical physics from a mathematical perspective. We formalize the concept of “linear response function” in the general framework of Markov processes. We show that for processes out of equilibrium it depends not only on the given Markov process X(s) but also on the chosen perturbation of it. We characterize the set of all possible response functions for a given Markov process and show that at equilibrium they all satisfy the FDT. That is,...
We develop a potential theoretic approach to the problem of metastability for reversible diffusion processes with generators of the form on or subsets of , where is a smooth function with finitely many local minima. In analogy to previous work on discrete Markov chains, we show that metastable exit times from the attractive domains of the minima of can be related, up to multiplicative errors that tend to one as , to the capacities of suitably constructed sets. We show that these capacities...
We continue the analysis of the problem of metastability for reversible diffusion processes, initiated in [BEGK3], with a precise analysis of the low-lying spectrum of the generator. Recall that we are considering processes with generators of the form on or subsets of , where is a smooth function with finitely many local minima. Here we consider only the generic situation where the depths of all local minima are different. We show that in general the exponentially small part of the spectrum...
We prove fluctuation bounds for the particle current in totally asymmetric zero range processes in one dimension with nondecreasing, concave jump rates whose slope decays exponentially. Fluctuations in the characteristic directions have order of magnitude t1/3. This is in agreement with the expectation that these systems lie in the same KPZ universality class as the asymmetric simple exclusion process. The result is via a robust argument formulated for a broad class of deposition-type processes....
Consider Glauber dynamics for the Ising model on a graph of n vertices. Hayes and Sinclair showed that the mixing time for this dynamics is at least nlog n/f(Δ), where Δ is the maximum degree and f(Δ) = Θ(Δlog2Δ). Their result applies to more general spin systems, and in that generality, they showed that some dependence on Δ is necessary. In this paper, we focus on the ferromagnetic Ising model and prove that the mixing time of Glauber dynamics on any n-vertex graph is at least (1/4 + o(1))nlog n....