Duality for General Attractive Spin Systems with Applications in One Dimension

Abstract

A duality theory is developed which works for general Markovian spin-flip systems with attractive rates. This theory is applied to one-dimensional nearest neighbor translation invariant systems to extend results which were first proved for the contact process by Durrett and Griffeath (1983). In particular, exponential convergence to equilibrium starting from all 1's is shown for noncritical nonergodic systems (Theorem 2). As a consequence, two different definitions of the critical value are shown to be equivalent (Theorem 5). In the course of the proof of Theorem 2, a new result concerning the distribution of the system near edges is obtained (Theorem 4).