Nilpotency and Limit Sets of Cellular Automata

A one-dimensional cellular automaton is a dynamical system which consisting in a juxtaposition of cells whose state changes over discrete time according to that of their neighbors. One of its simplest behaviors is nilpotency: all configurations of cells are mapped after a finite time into a given "null" configuration. Our main result is that nilpotency is equivalent to the condition that all configurations converge towards the null configuration for the Cantor topology, or, equivalently, that all cells of all configurations asymptotically reach a given state.