A Thomson-type variational principle for diffusion coefficients

Abstract

We consider reversible interacting particle systems with conserved number of particles. A standard variational formulation describes the diffusion coefficient of such models as the infimum of a certain functional. The purpose of this paper is to derive a new, alternative, variational characterization, as the supremum of another functional. This is a more natural framework when one is interested in obtaining lower bounds on the diffusion coefficient. We present a specific example of a kinetically constrained lattice gas where this variational principle can be applied.