No Arabic abstract
Motivated by the study of rare events for a typical genetic switching model in systems biology, in this paper we aim to establish the general two-scale large deviations for chemical reaction systems. We build a formal approach to explicitly obtain the large deviation rate functionals for the considered two-scale processes based upon the second-quantization path integral technique. We get three important types of large deviation results when the underlying two times scales are in three different regimes. This is realized by singular perturbation analysis to the rate functionals obtained by path integral. We find that the three regimes possess the same deterministic mean-field limit but completely different chemical Langevin approximations. The obtained results are natural extensions of the classical large volume limit for chemical reactions. We also discuss its implication on the single-molecule Michaelis-Menten kinetics. Our framework and results can be applied to understand general multi-scale systems including diffusion processes.
For diffusive many-particle systems such as the SSEP (symmetric simple exclusion process) or independent particles coupled with reservoirs at the boundaries, we analyze the density fluctuations conditioned on current integrated over a large time. We determine the conditioned large deviation function of density by a microscopic calculation. We then show that it can be expressed in terms of the solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi equations, which can be written for general diffusive systems using a fluctuating hydrodynamics description.
We present a systematic analysis of stochastic processes conditioned on an empirical measure $Q_T$ defined in a time interval $[0,T]$ for large $T$. We build our analysis starting from a discrete time Markov chain. Results for a continuous time Markov process and Langevin dynamics are derived as limiting cases. We show how conditioning on a value of $Q_T$ modifies the dynamics. For a Langevin dynamics with weak noise, we introduce conditioned large deviations functions and calculate them using either a WKB method or a variational formulation. This allows us, in particular, to calculate the typical trajectory and the fluctuations around this optimal trajectory when conditioned on a certain value of $Q_T$.
We formulate the large deviations for a class of two scale chemical kinetic processes motivated from biological applications. The result is successfully applied to treat a genetic switching model with positive feedbacks. The corresponding Hamiltonian is convex with respect to the momentum variable as a by-product of the large deviation theory. This property ensures its superiority in the rare event simulations compared with the result obtained by formal WKB asymptotics. The result is of general interest to understand the large deviations for multiscale problems.
Path integrals constitute powerful representations for both quantum and stochastic dynamics. Yet despite many decades of intensive studies, there is no consensus on how to formulate them for dynamics in curved space, or how to make them covariant with respect to nonlinear transform of variables. In this work, we construct rigorous and covariant formulations of time-slicing path integrals for quantum and classical stochastic dynamics in curved space. We first establish a rigorous criterion for correct time-slice actions of path integrals (Lemma 1). This implies the existence of infinitely many equivalent representations for time-slicing path integral. We then show that, for any dynamics with second order generator, all time-slice actions are asymptotically equivalent to a Gaussian (Lemma 2). Using these results, we further construct a continuous family of equivalent actions parameterized by an interpolation parameter $alpha in [0,1]$ (Lemma 3). The action generically contains a spurious drift term linear in $Delta boldsymbol x$, whose concrete form depends on $alpha$. Finally we also establish the covariance of our path-integral formalism, by demonstrating how the action transforms under nonlinear transform of variables. The $alpha = 0$ representation of time-slice action is particularly convenient because it is Gaussian and invariant, as long as $Delta boldsymbol x$ transforms according to Itos formula.
The path integral quantization method is applied to a relativistically covariant version of the Hopfield model, which represents a very interesting mesoscopic framework for the description of the interaction between quantum light and dielectric quantum matter, with particular reference to the context of analogue gravity. In order to take into account the constraints occurring in the model, we adopt the Faddeev-Jackiw approach to constrained quantization in the path integral formalism. In particular we demonstrate that the propagator obtained with the Faddeev-Jackiw approach is equivalent to the one which, in the framework of Dirac canonical quantization for constrained systems, can be directly computed as the vacuum expectation value of the time ordered product of the fields. Our analysis also provides an explicit example of quantization of the electromagnetic field in a covariant gauge and coupled with the polarization field, which is a novel contribution to the literature on the Faddeev-Jackiw procedure.