Mean-field analysis of the majority-vote model broken-ergodicity steady state

TL;DR

This paper provides an analytical mean-field analysis of a one-dimensional majority-vote model with a tie-retention rule, revealing complex steady states and mapping properties between initial and final configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field framework with n-site approximations to analyze the broken-ergodicity steady state of the model, including exact solutions for n=3 and 4.

Findings

Analytical solutions for the steady state using n=3 and 4-site approximations.

Mapping between initial configurations and absorbing states.

Predictions match Monte Carlo simulations perfectly.

Abstract

We study analytically a variant of the one-dimensional majority-vote model in which the individual retains its opinion in case there is a tie among the neighbors' opinions. The individuals are fixed in the sites of a ring of size $L$ and can interact with their nearest neighbors only. The interesting feature of this model is that it exhibits an infinity of spatially heterogeneous absorbing configurations for $L \to \infty$ whose statistical properties we probe analytically using a mean-field framework based on the decomposition of the $L$-site joint probability distribution into the $n$-contiguous-site joint distributions, the so-called $n$-site approximation. To describe the broken-ergodicity steady state of the model we solve analytically the mean-field dynamic equations for arbitrary time $t$ in the cases n=3 and 4. The asymptotic limit $t \to \infty$ reveals the mapping between the statistical properties of the random initial configurations and those of the final absorbing configurations. For the pair approximation ($n=2$) we derive that mapping using a trick that avoids solving the full dynamics. Most remarkably, we find that the predictions of the 4-site approximation reduce to those of the 3-site in the case of expectations involving three contiguous sites. In addition, those expectations fit the Monte Carlo data perfectly and so we conjecture that they are in fact the exact expectations for the one-dimensional majority-vote model.