A quasi-potential for conservation laws with boundary conditions

Abstract: We compute the quasi-potential and determine minimizing paths for an action functional related to scalar conservation laws on an interval with boundary conditions in the sense of Bardos et al. (1979). Taking as input an exclusion-like flux function, a strictly convex entropy, and boundary data, we obtain a generalization of the functional derived by Derrida, Lebowtiz and Speer (2003) for the stationary large deviations of the asymmetric exclusion process.