We consider the boundary driven harmonic model, i.e. the Markov process associated to the open integrable XXX chain with non-compact spins. We characterize its stationary measure as a mixture of product measures. For all spin values, we identify the law of the mixture in terms of the Dirichlet process. Next, by using the explicit knowledge of the non-equilibrium steady state we establish formulas predicted by Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory for several quantities of interest: the pressure (by Varadhan’s lemma), the density large deviation function (by contraction principle), the additivity principle (by using the Markov property of the mixing law). To our knowledge, the results presented in this paper constitute the first rigorous derivation of these macroscopic properties for models of energy transport with unbounded state space, starting from the microscopic structure of the non-equilibrium steady state.

We study a class of interacting particle systems with asymmetric interaction showing a self-duality property. The class includes the ASEP(q, θ), asymmetric exclusion process, with a repulsive interaction, allowing up to θ ∈ N particles in each site, and the ASIP(q, θ), θ ∈ R⁺, asymmetric inclusion process, that is its attractive counterpart. We extend to the asymmetric setting the investigation of orthogonal duality properties done in [8] for symmetric processes. The analysis leads to multivariate q−analogues of Krawtchouk polynomials and Meixner polynomials as orthogonal duality functions for the generalized asymmetric exclusion process and its asymmetric inclusion version, respectively. We also show how the q-Krawtchouk orthogonality relations can be used to compute exponential moments and correlations of ASEP(q, θ).

We present a theorem which elucidates the connection between self-duality of Markov processes and representation theory of Lie algebras. In particular, we identify sufficient conditions such that the intertwining function between two representations of a certain Lie algebra is the self-duality function of a (Markov) operator. In concrete terms, the two representations are associated to two operators in interwining relation. The self-dual operator, which arise from an appropriate symmetric linear combination of them, is the generator of a Markov process. The theorem is applied to a series of examples, including Markov processes with a discrete state space (e.g. interacting particle systems) and Markov processes with continuous state space (e.g. diffusion processes). In the examples we use explicit representations of Lie algebras that are unitarily equivalent. As a consequence, in the discrete setting self-duality functions are given by orthogonal polynomials whereas in the continuous context they are Bessel functions.