TY - JOUR
T1 - Airy distribution
T2 - Experiment, large deviations, and additional statistics
AU - Agranov, Tal
AU - Zilber, Pini
AU - Smith, Naftali R.
AU - Admon, Tamir
AU - Roichman, Yael
AU - Meerson, Baruch
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
PY - 2020/2
Y1 - 2020/2
N2 - The Airy distribution (AD) describes the probability distribution of the area under a Brownian excursion. The AD is prominent in several areas of physics, mathematics, and computer science. Here we use a dilute colloidal system to directly measure the AD in experiment. We also show how two different techniques of theory of large deviations, the Donsker-Varadhan formalism and the optimal fluctuation method, manifest themselves in the AD. We advance the theory of the AD by calculating, at large and small areas, the position distribution of a Brownian excursion conditioned on a given area and measure its mean in the experiment. For large areas, we uncover two singularities in the large-deviation function, which can be interpreted as dynamical phase transitions of third order. For small areas the position distribution coincides with the Ferrari-Spohn distribution, and we identify the reason for this coincidence.
AB - The Airy distribution (AD) describes the probability distribution of the area under a Brownian excursion. The AD is prominent in several areas of physics, mathematics, and computer science. Here we use a dilute colloidal system to directly measure the AD in experiment. We also show how two different techniques of theory of large deviations, the Donsker-Varadhan formalism and the optimal fluctuation method, manifest themselves in the AD. We advance the theory of the AD by calculating, at large and small areas, the position distribution of a Brownian excursion conditioned on a given area and measure its mean in the experiment. For large areas, we uncover two singularities in the large-deviation function, which can be interpreted as dynamical phase transitions of third order. For small areas the position distribution coincides with the Ferrari-Spohn distribution, and we identify the reason for this coincidence.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089901734&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013174
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013174
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AN - SCOPUS:85089901734
SN - 2643-1564
VL - 2
JO - Physical Review Research
JF - Physical Review Research
IS - 1
M1 - 013174
ER -