Mixing properties of colourings of the ℤd lattice

Abstract

We study and classify proper q-colourings of the ℤd lattice, identifying three regimes where different combinatorial behaviour holds. (1) When $q\le d+1$ , there exist frozen colourings, that is, proper q-colourings of ℤd which cannot be modified on any finite subset. (2) We prove a strong list-colouring property which implies that, when $q\ge d+2$ , any proper q-colouring of the boundary of a box of side length $n \ge d+2$ can be extended to a proper q-colouring of the entire box. (3) When $q\geq 2d+1$ , the latter holds for any $n \ge 1$ . Consequently, we classify the space of proper q-colourings of the ℤd lattice by their mixing properties.