Convergence to the maximal invariant measure for a zero-range process with random rates. (Q1879483)

The paper concerns the actual topic of interacting particle systems in random environment. In particular, a one-dimensional, totally asymmetric, nearest-neighbor zero-range process in a non-homogeneous environment is considered. The evolution can be described as follows: A particle jumps from a site \(x\in Z\) (if there is any) to \(x+1\) at rate \(p_x\in [c,1]\) with fixed \(c>0\). A rate configuration \(p=(p_x; x\in Z)\) is called an environment which can be random, distributed according to some measure \(m\) on the space of possible environments. The first main result is that the set of extremal invariant measures for the process with fixed environment is a particular set of product measures \( \nu _{p,v}\) with geometric marginals \[ \nu_{p,v}\left \{\xi ,\xi (x)=k \right \} = (v/ p_x)^{k} (1-v/ p_x). \] As a consequence every \(\nu _{p,v}\) is concentrated on configurations with \[ D(\xi ) = \lim _{n\to \infty } {1\over n}\sum _{x=n+1}^{0} \xi (x) = R(p,v). \] Denoting \(\rho ^{\ast }(p)=\lim _{v\to c}R(p,v)\), the second result of the paper states that, providing \(\rho ^{\ast }(p)<\infty \), if the initial measure concentrates on the configurations with \(D(\xi )>\rho ^{\ast }(p)\), then the process converges to the maximal invariant measure \(\nu _{p,c}\). The results hold for \(m\)-almost every environments. Many of the proofs are based on standard coupling arguments.