Fluctuations in the weakly asymmetric exclusion process with open boundary conditions

Abstract

We investigate the fluctuations around the average density profile in the weakly asymmetric exclusion process with open boundaries in the steady state. We show that these fluctuations are given, in the macroscopic limit, by a centered Gaussian field and we compute explicitly its covariance function. We use two approaches. The first method is dynamical and based on fluctuations around the hydrodynamic limit. We prove that the density fluctuations evolve macroscopically according to an autonomous stochastic equation, and we search for the stationary distribution of this evolution. The second approach, which is based on a representation of the steady state as a sum over paths, allows one to write the density fluctuations in the steady state as a sum over two independent processes, one of which is the derivative of a Brownian motion, the other one being related to a random path in a potential.