English

A perturbed cellular automaton with two phase transitions for the ergodicity

Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases 2025-07-08 v1 Dynamical Systems Probability

Abstract

The positive rates conjecture states that a one-dimensional probabilistic cellular automaton (PCA) with strictly positive transition rates must be ergodic. The conjecture has been refuted by G\'acs, whose counterexample is a cellular automaton that is non-ergodic under uniform random noise with sufficiently small rate. For all known counterexamples, non-ergodicity has been proved under small enough rates. Conversely, all cellular automata are ergodic with sufficiently high-rate noise. No other types of phase transitions of ergodicity are known, and the behavior of known counterexamples under intermediate noise rates is unknown. We present an example of a cellular automaton with two phase transitions. Using G\'acs's result as a black box, we construct a cellular automaton that is ergodic under small noise rates, non-ergodic for slightly higher rates, and again ergodic for rates close to 1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.03485,
  title  = {A perturbed cellular automaton with two phase transitions for the ergodicity},
  author = {Hugo Marsan and Mathieu Sablik and Ilkka Törmä},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.03485},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

33 pages, 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:46:37.305Z