Boundary driven Brownian gas

Abstract: We consider a gas of independent Brownian particles on a bounded interval in contact with two particle reservoirs at the endpoints. Due to the Brownian nature of the particles, infinitely many particles enter and leave the system in each time interval. Nonetheless, the dynamics can be constructed as a Markov process with continuous paths on a suitable space. If $\lambda_0$ and $\lambda_1$ are the chemical potentials of the boundary reservoirs, the stationary distribution (reversible if and only if $\lambda_0=\lambda_1$) is a Poisson point process with intensity given by the linear interpolation between $\lambda_0$ and $\lambda_1$. We then analyze the empirical flow that it is defined by counting, in a time interval $[0,t]$, the net number of particles crossing a given point $x$. In the stationary regime we identify its statistics and show that it is given, apart an $x$ dependent correction that is bounded for large $t$, by the difference of two independent Poisson processes with parameters $\lambda_0$ and $\lambda_1$.