Integrability in the weak noise theory

Abstract

We consider the variational problem associated with the Freidlin--Wentzell Large Deviation Principle (LDP) for the Stochastic Heat Equation (SHE). For a general class of initial-terminal conditions, we show that a minimizer of this variational problem exists, and any minimizer solves a system of imaginary-time Nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equations. This system is integrable. Utilizing the integrability, we prove that the formulas from the physics work Krajenbrink and Le Doussal (2021) hold for every minimizer of the variational problem. As an application, we consider the Freidlin--Wentzell LDP for the SHE with the delta initial condition. Under a technical assumption on the poles of the reflection coefficients, we prove the explicit expression for the one-point rate function that was predicted in the physics works Le Doussal, Majumdar, Rosso, and Schehr (2016) and Krajenbrink and Le Doussal (2021). Under the same assumption, we give detailed pointwise estimates of the most probable shape in the upper-tail limit.