A Diffusive System Driven by a Battery or by a Smoothly Varying Field

Abstract

We consider the steady state of a one dimensional diffusive system, such as the symmetric simple exclusion process (SSEP) on a ring, driven by a battery at the origin or by a smoothly varying field along the ring. The battery appears as the limiting case of a smoothly varying field, when the field becomes a delta function at the origin. We find that in the scaling limit, the long range pair correlation functions of the system driven by a battery turn out to be very different from the ones known in the steady state of the SSEP maintained out of equilibrium by contact with two reservoirs, even when the steady state density profiles are identical in both models.