Duality in single-file diffusion

Pierre Rizkallah, Aurélien Grabsch, Pierre Illien, Olivier Bénichou

Published 2022-07-15Version 1

Single-file transport, which corresponds to the diffusion of particles that cannot overtake each other in narrow channels, is an important topic in out-of-equilibrium statistical physics. Various microscopic models of single-file systems have been considered, such as the simple exclusion process (SEP), which has reached the status of a paradigmatic model. Several different models of single-file diffusion have been shown to be related by a duality relation, which holds either microscopically or only in the hydrodynamic limit of large time and large distances. Here we show that these relations are not specific to these models and that, in the hydrodynamic limit, every single-file system can be mapped onto a dual single-file system. This general duality relation allows to obtain new results for different models, by exploiting the solutions that are available for their dual.