Approach to equilibrium for Markovian infinite particle systems with exclusion interaction

Abstract

The N-exclusion process is an interacting particle system that generalizes the simple exclusion process by allowing up to N particles at each site. In this work, we define the jump rates to be 1 if any particles are present and 0 if not, and we consider the infinite-volume limit of this process in arbitrary dimension. Assuming symmetry and translation invariance of the underlying Markov chain, we show that the extremal translation-invariant stationary measures are product measures, one for each given "density" of particles. With the further assumption of irreducibility, we generalize a coupling argument of Liggett to show that every translation-invariant measure converges to a mixture of these product measures.