Disordered exclusion process revisited: some exact results in the low-current regime

Abstract

We study steady state of the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process with inhomogeneous hopping rates associated with sites (site-wise disorder). Using the fact that the non-normalized steady-state weights which solve the master equation are polynomials in all the hopping rates, we propose a general method for calculating their first few lowest coefficients exactly. In case of binary disorder where all slow sites share the same hopping rate r<1, we apply this method to calculate steady-state current up to the quadratic term in r for some particular disorder configurations. For the most general (non-binary) disorder, we show that in the low-current regime the current is determined solely by the current-minimizing subset of equal hopping rates, regardless of other hopping rates. Our approach can be readily applied to any other driven diffusive system with unidirectional hopping if one can identify a hopping rate such that the current vanishes when this rate is set to zero.