BBS invariant measures with independent soliton components (Q2201492)

The Box-Ball System (BBS) is a one-dimensional cellular automaton on a bi-infinite sequence of boxes, each containing at most one ball: the automaton scans the sequence starting from \(-\infty\); each time it sees a ball it picks it up, and drops it in the first available empty box. In particular, a sequence of \(k\) consecutive balls, followed by \(k\) consecutive empty boxes, is a stable configuration that travels at speed \(k\); it is called a \emph{\(k\)-soliton}. A typical configuration will contain many solitons with different speeds, which will ``collide'' under evolution but can nevertheless be identified through collisions. The authors consider a random state of the BBS, in which every box contains independently a ball with probability \(\lambda<1/2\). Following [\textit{P. A. Ferrari} et al., ``Soliton decomposition of the box-ball-system'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1806.02798}], the state of a BBS can be decomposed into a family of soliton components of various sizes (\(k\)) and position (\(i\)). The main result of the present paper describes the probability distribution of these soliton components: they are independent, and the number of \(k\)-solitons at slot \(i\) follows a geometric law. They then extend this result to other initial measures.