A Perturbed Cellular Automaton with Two Phase Transitions for the Ergodicity

Abstract The positive rates conjecture states that a one-dimensional probabilistic cellular automaton (PCA) with strictly positive transition rates must be ergodic. The conjecture has been refuted by Gács, whose counterexample is a cellular automaton that is non-ergodic under uniform random noise with sufficiently small rate. For all known counterexamples, non-ergodicity has been proved under small enough rates. Conversely, all cellular automata are ergodic with sufficiently high-rate noise. No other types of phase transitions of ergodicity are known, and the behavior of known counterexamples under intermediate noise rates is unknown. We present an example of a cellular automaton with two phase transitions. Using Gács’s result as a black box, we construct a cellular automaton that is ergodic under small noise rates, non-ergodic for slightly higher rates, and again ergodic for rates close to 1.