Blocking measures for asymmetric exclusion processes via coupling

Abstract

We give sufficient conditions on the rates of two asymmetric exclusion processes such that the existence of a blocking invariant measure for the first implies the existence of such a measure for the second. The main tool is a coupling between the two processes under which the first dominates the second in an appropriate sense. In an appendix we construct a class of processes for which the existence of a blocking measure can be proven directly; these are candidates for comparison processes in applications of the main result.