The simple exclusion process on finite connected graphs

Abstract

Consider a system of $K$ particles moving on the vertex set of a finite connected graph with at most one particle per vertex. If there is one, the particle at $x$ chooses one of the $\hbox{deg} (x)$ neighbors of its location uniformly at random at rate $ρ_x$, and jumps to that vertex if and only if it is empty. Using standard probability techniques, we identify the set of invariant measures of this process to study the occupation time at each vertex. Our main result shows that, though the occupation time at vertex $x$ increases with $\hbox{deg} (x) / ρ_x$, the ratio of the occupation times at two different vertices converges monotonically to one as the number of particles increases to the number of vertices. The occupation times are also computed explicitly for simple examples of finite connected graphs: the star and the path.