An exactly solvable macroscopic fluctuation theory of single-file diffusion
arXiv:2607.14073
The authors present an exact solution of macroscopic fluctuation theory for single‑file diffusion of extended Brownian hard rods, deriving large‑deviation statistics for tracer position and integrated current via a canonical transformation and confirming the results with rare‑event simulations.
Abstract
Single-file diffusion is a ubiquitous phenomenon in low-dimensional systems, arising in transport inside narrow channels. Its natural continuum model is a one-dimensional gas of extended Brownian hard rods (BHR). Perhaps owing to the perceived intractability of this problem, much of the literature has traditionally focused on lattice exclusion models, where integrability methods have yielded remarkable, albeit limited, exact results. A major recent advance comes from a formal solution of macroscopic fluctuation theory (MFT) for the exclusion process. Yet, despite the formal solution, only a handful of properties have been made explicit. We show that the corresponding MFT of the extended BHR gas is in fact exactly solvable through a canonical transformation. We demonstrate this by explicit computation of the large-deviation statistics of the tracer-position and integrated-current in both annealed and quenched ensembles. We further show that an analogous canonical transformation applies to the MFT of lattice gases with finite-volume exclusion, yielding corresponding tracer and current statistics. We validate our results using rare-event simulations for both the continuum and the lattice models.
8 pages, 3 figures + 8 pages of supplement