Quadratic Fluctuations of the Simple Exclusion Process

We introduce a two-dimensional, distribution-valued field which we call the quadratic field associated to the one-dimensional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We show that the stationary quadratic fluctuations of the simple exclusion process, when rescaled in the diffusive scaling, converge to this quadratic field. We show that this quadratic field evaluated at the diagonal corresponds to the Wick-renormalized square of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, and we use this new representation in order to prove some small and large-time properties of it.