Quasipotentials in the nonequilibrium stationary states or a method to get explicit solutions of Hamilton–Jacobi equations

Abstract

Abstract We assume that a system at a mesoscopic scale is described by a field ϕ(x, t) that evolves by a Langevin equation with a white noise whose intensity is controlled by a parameter 1 / Ω . The system stationary state distribution in the small noise limit (Ω → ∞) is of the form P st [ϕ] ≃ exp(−ΩV 0[ϕ]), where V 0[ϕ] is called the quasipotential. V 0 is the unknown of a Hamilton–Jacobi equation. Therefore, V 0 can be written as an action computed along a path that is the solution from Hamilton’s equation that typically cannot be solved explicitly. This paper presents a theoretical scheme that builds a suitable canonical transformation that permits us to do such integration by deforming the original path into a straight line and including some weights along with it. We get the functional form of such weights through conditions on the existence and structure of the canonical transformation. We apply the scheme to get the quasipotential algebraically for several one-dimensional nonequilibrium models as the diffusive and reaction–diffusion systems.