Uniqueness and non-uniqueness of chains on half lines

Abstract

We establish a one-to-one correspondence between one-sided and two-sided regular systems of conditional probabilities on the half-line that preserves the associated chains and Gibbs measures. As an application, we determine uniqueness and non-uniqueness regimes in one-sided versions of ferromagnetic Ising models with long range interactions. Our study shows that the interplay between chain and Gibbsian theories yields more information than that contained within the known theory of each separate framework. In particular: (i) A Gibbsian construction due to Dyson yields a new family of chains with phase transitions; (ii) these transitions show that a square summability uniqueness condition of chains is false in the general non-shift-invariant setting, and (iii) an uniqueness criterion for chains shows that a Gibbsian conjecture due to Kac and Thompson is false in this half-line setting.