On the absence of time-translation symmetry breaking in some non-reversible interacting particle systems

Abstract

The conditions under which stochastic systems of infinitely many interacting particles can maintain sufficient spatial order to move coherently along a time-periodic orbit, thereby breaking the time-translation invariance of the underlying dynamical equation, have been an elusive issue. Via a free energy technique, we prove that if a non-reversible interacting particle system on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d=1,2$, with strictly positive rates admits a product measure as a stationary measure, then it cannot exhibit time-periodic behaviour. This provides a first step towards a general conjecture that time-periodic behaviour cannot occur in one- and two-dimensional systems with short-range interactions and constitutes the first result for non-reversible dynamics in dimension two.