English

Mixing trichotomy for an Ehrenfest urn with impurities

Probability 2024-07-12 v3

Abstract

We consider a version of the classical Ehrenfest urn model with two urns and two types of balls: regular and heavy. Each ball is selected independently according to a Poisson process having rate 11 for regular balls and rate α(0,1)\alpha\in(0,1) for heavy balls, and once a ball is selected, is placed in a urn uniformly at random. We study the asymptotic behavior when the total number of balls, NN, goes to infinity, and the number of heavy ball is set to mN{1,,N1}m_N\in\{1,\dots, N-1\}. We focus on the observable given by the total number of balls in the left urn, which converges to a binomial distribution of parameter 1/21/2, regardless of the choice of the two parameters, α\alpha and mNm_N. We study the speed of convergence and show that this can exhibit three different phenomenologies depending on the choice of the two parameters of the model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.06109,
  title  = {Mixing trichotomy for an Ehrenfest urn with impurities},
  author = {Matteo Quattropani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.06109},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

13 pages. Accepted for publication in ECP