Dynamically emergent correlations between particles in a switching harmonic trap

Abstract

We study a one dimensional gas of $N$ noninteracting diffusing particles in a harmonic trap, whose stiffness switches between two values $\mu_1$ and $\mu_2$ with constant rates $r_1$ and $r_2$ respectively. Despite the absence of direct interaction between the particles, we show that strong correlations between them emerge in the stationary state at long times, induced purely by the dynamics itself. We compute exactly the joint distribution of the positions of the particles in the stationary state, which allows us to compute several physical observables analytically. In particular, we show that the extreme value statistics (EVS), i.e., the distribution of the position of the rightmost particle has a nontrivial shape in the large $N$ limit. The scaling function characterizing this EVS has a finite support with a tunable shape (by varying the parameters). Remarkably, this scaling function turns out to be universal. First, it also describes the distribution of the position of the $k$-th rightmost particle in a $1d$ trap. Moreover, the distribution of the position of the particle farthest from the center of the harmonic trap in $d$ dimensions is also described by the same scaling function for all $d \geq 1$. Numerical simulations are in excellent agreement with our analytical predictions.