Macroscopic fluctuation theory of correlations in hard rod gas

Abstract: Recently, a theoretical framework known as ballistic macroscopic fluctuation theory has been developed to study large-scale fluctuations and correlations in many-body systems exhibiting ballistic transport. In this paper, we review this theory in the context of a one-dimensional gas of hard rods. The initial configurations of the rods are sampled from a probability distribution characterized by slowly varying conserved density profiles across space. Beginning from a microscopic description, we first formulate the macroscopic fluctuation theory in terms of the phase-space density of quasiparticles. In the second part, we apply this framework to compute the two-point, two-time correlation functions of the conserved densities in the Euler scaling limit. We derive an explicit expression for the correlation function, which not only reveals its inherent symmetries but is also straightforward to evaluate numerically for a given initial state. Our results also recover known expressions for space-time correlations in equilibrium for the hard rod gas.