Modified saddle-point integral near singularity for the large deviation function

Abstract

Long-time-integrated quantities in stochastic processes, in or out of equilibrium, usually exhibit rare but huge fluctuations. Work or heat production is such a quantity, of which the probability distribution function displays an exponential decay characterized by the large deviation function (LDF). The LDF is often deduced from the cumulant generating function through the inverse Fourier transformation. The saddle-point integration method is a powerful technique to obtain the asymptotic results in the Fourier integral, but a special care should be taken when the saddle point is located near a singularity of the integrand. In this paper, we present a modified saddle-point method to handle such a difficulty efficiently. We investigate the dissipated and injected heat production in equilibration processes with various initial conditions, as an example, where the generating functions contain branch-cut singularities as well as power-law ones. Exploiting the new modified saddle-point integrations, we obtain the leading finite-time corrections for the LDF's, which are confirmed by numerical results.