We will discuss systems of diffusion processes on the real line, in which the dynamics of every single process is determined by its rank in the entire particle system. Such systems arise in mathematical finance and statistical physics, and are related to heavy-traffic approximations of queueing networks. Motivated by the applications, we address questions about invariant distributions, convergence to equilibrium and concentration of measure for certain statistics, as well as hydrodynamic limits and large deviations for these particle systems. Parts of the talk are joint work with Amir Dembo, Tomoyuki Ichiba, Soumik Pal and Ofer Zeitouni

In this talk we will consider two competing first passage percolation processes started from uniformly chosen subsets of a random regular graph on N vertices. The processes are allowed to spread with different rates, start from vertex subsets of different sizes or at different times. We obtain tight results regarding the sizes of the vertex sets occupied by each process, showing that in the generic situation one process will occupy roughly N^alpha vertices, for some 0 < alpha < 1. The value of alpha is calculated in terms of the relative rates of the processes, as well as the sizes of the initial vertex sets and the possible time advantage of one process. These results are in sharp contrast with the picture in the lattice case.
This is a joint work with Yael Dekel, Elchanan Mossel and Yuval Peres.

Abstract: I'll talk about the recently discovered strong negative dependence properties of the symmetric exclusion process, a model of non-intersecting random walkers. The negative dependence theory gives a simple way to show central limit theorems for the bulk motion of particles. Our results are general enough to deal with non-equilibrium systems of particles with inhomogeneous hopping rates.