Exclusion processes in higher dimensions: Stationary measures and convergence

Abstract

There has been significant progress recently in our understanding of the stationary measures of the exclusion process on Z. The corresponding situation in higher dimensions remains largely a mystery. In this paper we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a product measure to be stationary for the exclusion process on an arbitrary set, and apply this result to find examples on Z^d and on homogeneous trees in which product measures are stationary even when they are neither homogeneous nor reversible. We then begin the task of narrowing down the possibilities for existence of other stationary measures for the process on Z^d. In particular, we study stationary measures that are invariant under translations in all directions orthogonal to a fixed nonzero vector. We then prove a number of convergence results as t→∞ for the measure of the exclusion process. Under appropriate initial conditions, we show convergence of such measures to the above stationary measures. We also employ hydrodynamics to provide further examples of convergence.