Hydrodynamic Limit for an Open Facilitated Exclusion Process with Slow and Fast Boundaries

Abstract

We study the symmetric facilitated exclusion process (FEP) on the finite one-dimensional lattice \(\lbrace 1,\hdots , N-1\rbrace \) when put in contact with boundary reservoirs, whose action is subject to an additional kinetic constraint in order to enforce ergodicity, and whose speed is of order \(N^{-\theta }\) for some parameter \(\theta \). We derive its hydrodynamic limit as \(N\rightarrow \infty \), in the diffusive space-time scaling, when the initial density profile is supercritical. More precisely, the macroscopic density of particles evolves in the bulk according to a fast diffusion equation as in the periodic case, which is now subject to boundary conditions that can be of Dirichlet, Robin or Neumann type depending on the parameter \(\theta \). In the Dirichlet case, the FEP exhibits a very peculiar behaviour: unlike for the classical SSEP, and due to the two-phased nature of FEP, the reservoirs impose boundary densities which do not coincide with their equilibrium densities. The proof is based on the classical entropy method, but requires significant adaptations to account for the FEP’s non-product stationary states and to deal with the non-equilibrium setting.