Clustering in the Three and Four Color Cyclic Particle Systems in One Dimension

We study the \(\kappa \)-color cyclic particle system on the one-dimensional integer lattice \(\mathbb {Z}\), first introduced by Bramson and Griffeath (Ann Prob:26–45, 1989). In that paper they show that almost surely, every site changes its color infinitely often if \(\kappa \in \{3,4\}\) and only finitely many times if \(\kappa \ge 5\). In addition, they conjecture that for \(\kappa \in \{3,4\}\) the system clusters, that is, for any pair of sites x, y, with probability tending to 1 as \(t\rightarrow \infty \), x and y have the same color at time t. Here we prove that conjecture.