Large Deviations for the SSEP with slow boundary: the non-critical case

Abstract

We prove a large deviations principle for the empirical measure of the one dimensional symmetric simple exclusion process in contact with reservoirs. The dynamics of the reservoirs is slowed down with respect to the dynamics of the bulk of the system, that is, the rate at which the system exchanges particles with the boundary reservoirs is of order n −θ , where n is number of sites in the system, θ is a non negative parameter, and the system is taken in the diffusive time scaling tn2 . Two regimes are studied here, the subcritical θ ∈ (0, 1) whose hydrodynamic equation is the heat equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions and the supercritical θ ∈ (1, +∞) whose hydrodynamic equation is the heat equation with Neumann boundary conditions. In the subcritical case θ ∈ (0, 1), the rate function that we obtain matches with the rate function corresponding to the case θ = 0 which was derived on previous works, see Bertini et al. (2009); Farfan et al. (2011). In the supercritical case θ ∈ (1, +∞), the rate function is equal to infinity outside the set of trajectories that preserve the total mass, meaning that, despite the discrete system exchanges particles with the reservoirs, this phenomenon has super-exponentially small probability in the diffusive scaling limit.