Free energy in a Markovian model of a lattice spin system

A Markov process which may be thought of as a classical lattice spin system is considered. States of the system are probability measures on the configuration space, and we study the evolution of the free energy of these states with time. It is proved that for all initial states the free energy is nonincreasing and that it strictly decreases from any initial state which is shift invariant but not an equilibrium state. Finally we show that the state of the system converges weakly to the set of Gibbsian Distributions for the given interaction, and that all shift invariant equilibrium states are Gibbsian Distributions.This work was done while the author was a postdoctoral fellow in the Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science.