Duality between box-ball systems of finite box and/or carrier capacity

TL;DR

This paper explores the duality in box-ball systems with finite capacities, establishing a relationship between systems with swapped capacities, and characterizes invariant measures and particle speeds.

Contribution

It introduces a duality framework for BBS(J,K) systems, extending previous work and analyzing invariant measures and particle dynamics under this duality.

Findings

The dynamics of BBS(J,K) are dual to BBS(K,J) systems.

Invariant measures are characterized via a detailed balance equation.

The speed of a tagged particle satisfies a duality relation.

Abstract

We construct the dynamics of the box-ball system with box capacity $J$ and carrier capacity $K$, which we abbreviate to BBS($J$,$K$), in the case of infinite initial configurations, and show that this system is dual to the analogous BBS($K$,$J$) model. Towards this end, we build on previous work for the original box-ball system, that is BBS($1$,$\infty$), to show that when the box capacity $J$ and carrier capacity $K$ satisfy $J<K$ the dynamics can be represented by a Pitman-type transformation. These ideas are applied in the case of random initial configurations to show that the distributional properties of spatial stationarity and invariance under the BBS dynamics are dual. Moreover, for independent and identically distributed configurations, we derive a characterisation of invariant measures in terms of a detailed balance equation, which captures the duality of the system locally; this is used to find all invariant measures in this class. Finally, we deduce the speed of a tagged particle, and show that this also satisfies a natural duality relation.