Large deviations for empirical path measures in cycles of integer partitions

Stefan Adams

Published 2007-02-02, updated 2007-02-05Version 2

Consider a large system of $N$ Brownian motions in $\mathbb{R}^d$ on some fixed time interval $[0,\beta]$ with symmetrised initial-terminal condition. That is, for any $i$, the terminal location of the $i$-th motion is affixed to the initial point of the $\sigma(i)$-th motion, where $\sigma$ is a uniformly distributed random permutation of $1,...,N$. In this paper, we describe the large-N behaviour of the empirical path measure (the mean of the Dirac measures in the $N$ paths) when $ \Lambda\uparrow\mathbb{R}^d $ and $ N/|\Lambda|\to\rho $. The rate function is given as a variational formula involving a certain entropy functional and a Fenchel-Legendre transform. Depending on the dimension and the density $ \rho $, there is phase transition behaviour for the empirical path measure. For certain parameters (high density, large time horizon) and dimensions $ d\ge 3 $ the empirical path measure is not supported on all paths $ [0,\infty)\to\mathbb{R}^d $ which contain a bridge path of any finite multiple of the time horizon $ [0,\beta] $. For dimensions $ d=1,2 $, and for small densities and small time horizon $ [0,\beta] $ in dimensions $ d\ge 3$, the empirical path measure is supported on those paths. In the first regime a finite fraction of the motions lives in cycles of infinite length. We outline that this transition leads to an empirical path measure interpretation of {\it Bose-Einstein condensation}, known for systems of Bosons.