Cutoff profile of ASEP on a segment

12/29/2020

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by   Alexey Bufetov, et al.

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This paper studies the mixing behavior of the Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (ASEP) on a segment of length N. Our main result is that for particle densities in (0,1), the total-variation cutoff window of ASEP is N^1/3 and the cutoff profile is 1-F_GUE, where F_GUE is the Tracy-Widom distribution function. This also gives a new proof of the cutoff itself, shown earlier by Labbé and Lacoin. Our proof combines coupling arguments, the result of Tracy-Widom about fluctuations of ASEP started from the step initial condition, and exact algebraic identities coming from interpreting the multi-species ASEP as a random walk on a Hecke algebra.