A bottom-up approach to fluctuating hydrodynamics: Coarse-graining of stochastic lattice gases and the Dean-Kawasaki equation

Fluctuating hydrodynamics provides a quantitative, large-scale description of many-body systems in terms of smooth variables, with microscopic details entering only through a small set of transport coefficients. Although this framework has been highly successful in characterizing macroscopic fluctuations and correlations, a systematic derivation of fluctuating hydrodynamics from underlying stochastic microscopic dynamics remains obscure for broad classes of interacting systems. For stochastic lattice gas models with gradient dynamics and a single conserved density, we develop a path-integral based coarse-graining procedure that recovers fluctuating hydrodynamics in a controlled manner. Our analysis highlights the essential role of local-equilibrium averages, which go beyond naïve mean-field-type gradient expansions. We further extend this approach to interacting Brownian particles by coarse-graining the Dean-Kawasaki equation, revealing a mobility proportional to the density and a diffusivity determined by the thermodynamic pressure.