Hydrodynamic limit for a particle system with degenerate rates

Abstract

We study the hydrodynamic limit for some conservative particle systems with degenerate rates, namely with nearest neighbor exchange rates which vanish for certain configurations. These models belong to the class of kinetically constrained lattice gases (KCLG) which have been introduced and intensively studied in physical literature as simple models for the liquid/glass transition. Due to the degeneracy of rates there exist blocked configurations which do not evolve under the dynamics and in general the hyperplanes of configurations with a fixed number of particles can be decomposed into different irreducible sets. As a consequence, both the Entropy and Relative Entropy method cannot be straightforwardly applied to prove the hydrodynamic limit of KCLG. In particular, some care should be put when proving the One and Two-block Lemmas which guarantee local convergence to equilibrium. We show that, for initial profiles smooth enough and bounded away from zero and one, the macroscopic density profile for our KCLG evolves under the diffusive time scaling according to the porous medium equation. Then we prove the same result for more general profiles for a slightly perturbed dynamics obtained by adding jumps of the Symmetric Simple Exclusion. The role of the latter is to remove the degeneracy of rates and at the same time they are properly slowed down in order not to change the macroscopic behavior. The equilibrium fluctuations and the magnitude of the spectral gap for this perturbed model are also obtained. © Association des Publications de l'Institut Henri Poincaré, 2009.