Collision types and times in interacting particle systems
We consider a system of stochastic interacting particles with general diffusion coefficient and drift functions and we study the types of collisions that arise in them. In particular, interactions between particles are inversely proportional to their separation, and the coupling function of interaction is also considered in great generality. Our main result shows that, under positivity and the stated variance compatibility conditions, no two distinct positive-root hyperplanes are reached simultaneously at a positive time. In type $A_{N-1}$, this excludes both collisions involving three or more particles and simultaneous collisions of disjoint pairs. In order to obtain our results we make use of symmetric polynomials in squared root projections; the degree of these polynomials indicates the type of collision, and by a locality argument we show that polynomials indicating a non-simple collision almost surely do not cancel. We use this result to obtain upper and lower bounds for the Hausdorff dimension of the set of collision times in terms of interaction-to-variance ratios. These bounds coincide in particular constant-ratio cases. Our results cover many of the most well-known particle systems, such as the Dyson model and Wishart processes and their extensions to non-constant diffusion coefficients and background drifts.