Random Walks Of Infinitely Many Particles

The author's previous book, Random Walk in Random and Non-Random Environments, was devoted to the investigation of the Brownian motion of a simple particle. The present book studies the independent motions of infinitely many particles in the d-dimensional Euclidean space Rd. In Part I the particles at time t = 0 are distributed in Rd according to the law of a given random field and they execute independent random walks. Part II is devoted to branching random walks, i.e. to the case where the particles execute random motions and birth and death processes independently. Finally, in Part III, functional laws of iterated logarithms are proved for the cases of independent motions and branching processes.

This collection of articles is dedicated to Frank Spitzer on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The articles, written by a group of his friends, colleagues, former students and coauthors, are intended to demonstrate the major influence Frank has had on probability theory for the last 30 years and most likely will have for many years to come. Frank has always liked new phenomena, clean formulations and elegant proofs. He has created or opened up several research areas and it is not surprising that many people are still working out the consequences of his inventions. By way of introduction we have reprinted some of Frank's seminal articles so that the reader can easily see for himself the point of origin for much of the research presented here. These articles of Frank's deal with properties of Brownian motion, fluctuation theory and potential theory for random walks, and, of course, interacting particle systems. The last area was started by Frank as part of the general resurgence of treating problems of statistical mechanics with rigorous probabilistic tools.

This volume describes the current state of knowledge of random spatial processes, particularly those arising in physics. The emphasis is on survey articles which describe areas of current interest to probabilists and physicists working on the probability theory of phase transition. Special attention is given to topics deserving further research. The principal contributions by leading researchers concern the mathematical theory of random walk, interacting particle systems, percolation, Ising and Potts models, spin glasses, cellular automata, quantum spin systems, and metastability. The level of presentation and review is particularly suitable for postgraduate and postdoctoral workers in mathematics and physics, and for advanced specialists in the probability theory of spatial disorder and phase transition.

This volume contains the invited lectures presented during the NATO/ASI conducted in Pullman, Washington, July 9-18, 1989. This is the third in a series of NATO/ASIs on transport phenomena in porous media. The first two, which took place at Newark, Delaware in 1982 and 1985, are devoted to various topics related to the Fundamentals of Transport Processes in Porous Media. The contents of the books resulting from previous NATO/ASIs are given at the end of this book. Transport of extensive quantities such as mass of a fluid phase, mass of chemical species carried by a fluid phase, energy and electric charge in porous media, as encountered in a large variety of engineering disciplines, is an emerging interdisciplinary field. The groundwater flow, the simultaneous flow of gas, oil and water in petroleum reservoirs, the movement and accumulation of pollutants in the saturated and unsaturated subsurface zones, thermal energy storage in reservoirs, land subsidence in response to charges in overburden loads, or to pumping of fluids from underground formations, wave propagation in seismic investigations or as produced by earthquakes, chemical reactors, water flow through sand filters and the movement of fluids through kidneys, may serve as examples of fields in which the theory of transport in porous media is employed.

Entropy inequalities, correlation functions, couplings between stochastic processes are powerful techniques which have been extensively used to give arigorous foundation to the theory of complex, many component systems and to its many applications in a variety of fields as physics, biology, population dynamics, economics, ... The purpose of the book is to make theseand other mathematical methods accessible to readers with a limited background in probability and physics by examining in detail a few models where the techniques emerge clearly, while extra difficulties arekept to a minimum. Lanford's method and its extension to the hierarchy of equations for the truncated correlation functions, the v-functions, are presented and applied to prove the validity of macroscopic equations forstochastic particle systems which are perturbations of the independent and of the symmetric simple exclusion processes. Entropy inequalities are discussed in the frame of the Guo-Papanicolaou-Varadhan technique and of theKipnis-Olla-Varadhan super exponential estimates, with reference to zero-range models. Discrete velocity Boltzmann equations, reaction diffusion equations and non linear parabolic equations are considered, as limits of particles models. Phase separation phenomena are discussed in the context of Glauber+Kawasaki evolutions and reaction diffusion equations. Although the emphasis is onthe mathematical aspects, the physical motivations are explained through theanalysis of the single models, without attempting, however to survey the entire subject of hydrodynamical limits.

This volume contains translations of papers that originally appeared in the Japanese journal Sugaku. The papers range over a variety of topics in probability theory, statistics, and applications. This volume is suitable for graduate students and research mathematicians interested in probability and statistics.

Probability and Statistics theme is a component of Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme with contributions from distinguished experts in the field, discusses Probability and Statistics. Probability is a standard mathematical concept to describe stochastic uncertainty. Probability and Statistics can be considered as the two sides of a coin. They consist of methods for modeling uncertainty and measuring real phenomena. Today many important political, health, and economic decisions are based on statistics. This theme is structured in five main topics: Probability and Statistics; Probability Theory; Stochastic Processes and Random Fields; Probabilistic Models and Methods; Foundations of Statistics, which are then expanded into multiple subtopics, each as a chapter. These three volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs

This unique volume discusses some recent developments in the theory of spatial branching processes and superprocesses, with special emphasis on spines, Laws of Large Numbers, interactions and random media.Although this book is mainly written for mathematicians, the models discussed are relevant to certain models in population biology, and are thus hopefully interesting to the applied mathematician/biologist as well.The necessary background material in probability and analysis is provided in a comprehensive introductory chapter. Historical notes and several exercises are provided to complement each chapter.