A Perturbative Approach to the Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory

In this paper, we study the stationary states of diffusive dynamics driven out of equilibrium by reservoirs. For a small forcing, the system remains close to equilibrium and the large deviation functional of the density can be computed perturbatively by using the macroscopic fluctuation theory. This applies to general domains in \(\mathbb {R}^d\) and diffusive dynamics with arbitrary transport coefficients. As a consequence, one can analyse the correlations at the first non trivial order in the forcing and show that, in general, all the long range correlation functions are not equal to 0, in contrast to the exactly solvable models previously known.