Diffusion with conserved marginal distributions and information theory in fracton hydrodynamics
Phys. Rev. E 114, 034129 – Published 14 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8wsp-p1xb
Abstract
Diffusion with multipole-moment conservation gives rise to transport laws that generalize Fick's law and has attracted growing attention following experimental advances in strongly tilted optical lattices. It was recently shown that conserving complete multipole-moment groups leads to subdiffusive dynamics governed by a nonlinear diffusion equation, raising the question of whether hydrodynamic equations would also be nonlinear when the conservation law is imposed only at the subsystem level. Here we show that subsystem symmetries generically produce nonlinear hydrodynamic equations with shear-only transport, in which any localization present in the initial marginal distributions is preserved at long times by the conservation of those marginals. A linear regime emerges only as a limiting case for small fluctuations around a uniform background. We derive the deterministic and fluctuating parts of the hydrodynamic equations in arbitrary dimensions and obtain the corresponding maximum-entropy equilibrium distributions under constrained marginals. We also show that marginal-conserving diffusion provides a concrete hydrodynamic realization of partial multipole-moment conservation, and we offer an information-theoretic interpretation in which total correlation decays monotonically even when pairwise mutual information does not.
