Survival of interacting diffusing particles inside a domain with absorbing boundary

Abstract

Suppose that a $d$-dimensional domain is filled with a gas of (in general, interacting) diffusive particles with density $n_0$. A particle is absorbed whenever it reaches the domain boundary. Employing macroscopic fluctuation theory, we evaluate the probability ${\mathcal P}$ that no particles are absorbed during a long time $T$. We argue that the most likely gas density profile, conditional on this event, is stationary throughout most of the time $T$. As a result, ${\mathcal P}$ decays exponentially with $T$ for a whole class of interacting diffusive gases in any dimension. For $d=1$ the stationary gas density profile and ${\mathcal P}$ can be found analytically. In higher dimensions we focus on the simple symmetric exclusion process (SSEP) and show that $-\ln {\mathcal P}\simeq D_0TL^{d-2} \,s(n_0)$, where $D_0$ is the gas diffusivity, and $L$ is the linear size of the system. We calculate the rescaled action $s(n_0)$ for $d=1$, for rectangular domains in $d=2$, and for spherical domains. Near close packing of the SSEP $s(n_0)$ can be found analytically for domains of any shape and in any dimension.