Fr Francesca Nardi

Metastability for a stochastic dynamics with a parallel heat bath updating rule

We consider the problem of metastability for a stochastic dynamics with a parallel updating rule with single spin rates equal to those of the heat bath for the Ising nearest neighbors interaction. We study the exit from the metastable phase, we describe the typical exit path and evaluate the exit time. We prove that the phenomenology of metastability is different from the one observed in the case of the serial implementation of the heat bath dynamics. In particular we prove that an intermediate chessboard phase appears during the excursion from the minus metastable phase toward the plus stable phase.

Relaxation Height in Energy Landscapes: An Application to Multiple Metastable States

The study of systems with multiple (not necessarily degenerate) metastable states presents subtle difficulties from the mathematical point of view related to the variational problem that has to be solved in these cases. We prove sufficient conditions to identify multiple metastable states. Since this analysis typically involves non-trivial technical issues, we give different conditions that can be chosen appropriately depending on the specific model under study. We show how these results can be used to attack the problem of multiple metastable states via the use of the modern approaches to metastability. We finally apply these general results to the Blume–Capel model for a particular choice of the parameters for which the model happens to have two multiple not degenerate in energy metastable states. We estimate in probability the time for the transition from the metastable states to the stable state. Moreover we identify the set of critical configurations that represent the minimal gate for the transition.

On the Ising model with strongly anisotropic external field

In this paper we analyze the equilibrium phase diagram of the two-dimensional ferromagnetic n.n. Ising model when the external field takes alternating signs on different rows. We show that some of the zero-temperature coexistence lines disappear at every positive sufficiently small temperature, whereas one (and only one) of them persists for sufficiently low temperature.

Metastability for general dynamics with rare transitions : escape time and critical configurations

Metastability is a physical phenomenon ubiquitous in first order phase transitions. A fruitful mathematical way to approach this phenomenon is the study of rare transitions Markov chains. For Metropolis chains associated with statistical mechanics systems, this phenomenon has been described in an elegant way in terms of the energy landscape associated to the Hamiltonian of the system. In this paper, we provide a similar description in the general rare transitions setup. Beside their theoretical content, we believe that our results are a useful tool to approach metastability for non-Metropolis systems such as Probabilistic Cellular Automata.

Kawasaki Dynamics with Two Types of Particles: Stable/Metastable Configurations and Communication Heights

This is the second in a series of three papers in which we study a two-dimensional lattice gas consisting of two types of particles subject to Kawasaki dynamics at low temperature in a large finite box with an open boundary. Each pair of particles occupying neighboring sites has a negative binding energy provided their types are different, while each particle has a positive activation energy that depends on its type. There is no binding energy between particles of the same type. At the boundary of the box particles are created and annihilated in a way that represents the presence of an infinite gas reservoir. We start the dynamics from the empty box and are interested in the transition time to the full box. This transition is triggered by a critical droplet appearing somewhere in the box.In the first paper we identified the parameter range for which the system is metastable, showed that the first entrance distribution on the set of critical droplets is uniform, computed the expected transition time up to and including a multiplicative factor of order one, and proved that the nucleation time divided by its expectation is exponentially distributed, all in the limit of low temperature. These results were proved under three hypotheses, and involve three model-dependent quantities: the energy, the shape and the number of critical droplets. In the second paper we prove the first and the second hypothesis and identify the energy of critical droplets. In the third paper we settle the rest.Both the second and the third paper deal with understanding the geometric properties of subcritical, critical and supercritical droplets, which are crucial in determining the metastable behavior of the system, as explained in the first paper. The geometry turns out to be considerably more complex than for Kawasaki dynamics with one type of particle, for which an extensive literature exists. The main motivation behind our work is to understand metastability of multi-type particle systems.

Hitting time asymptotics for hard-core interactions on grids

We consider the hard-core model with Metropolis transition probabilities on finite grid graphs and investigate the asymptotic behavior of the first hitting time between its two maximum-occupancy configurations in the low-temperature regime. In particular, we show how the order-of-magnitude of this first hitting time depends on the grid sizes and on the boundary conditions by means of a novel combinatorial method. Our analysis also proves the asymptotic exponentiality of the scaled hitting time and yields the mixing time of the process in the low-temperature limit as side-result. In order to derive these results, we extended the model-independent framework in Manzo et al. (J Stat Phys 115(1/2):591–642, 2004) for first hitting times to allow for a more general initial state and target subset.

Magnetic order in the Ising model with parallel dynamics

It is discussed how the equilibrium properties of the Ising model are described by an Hamiltonian with an antiferromagnetic low temperature behavior if only an heat bath dynamics, with the characteristics of a Probabilistic cellular automaton, is assumed to determine the temporal evolution of the system.

Metastability for Glauber dynamics on random graphs

In this paper we study metastable behaviour at low temperature of Glauber spin-flip dynamics on random graphs. We fix a large number of vertices and randomly allocate edges according to the Configuration Model with a prescribed degree distribution. Each vertex carries a spin that can point either up or down. Each spin interacts with a positive magnetic field, while spins at vertices that are connected by edges also interact with each other via a ferromagnetic pair potential. We start from the configuration where all spins point down, and allow spins to flip up or down according to a Metropolis dynamics at positive temperature. We are interested in the time it takes the system to reach the configuration where all spins point up. In order to achieve this transition, the system needs to create a sufficiently large droplet of up-spins, called critical droplet, which triggers the crossover. In the limit as the temperature tends to zero, and subject to a certain \emph{key hypothesis} implying metastable behaviour, the average crossover time follows the classical \emph{Arrhenius law}, with an exponent and a prefactor that are controlled by the \emph{energy} and the \emph{entropy} of the critical droplet. The crossover time divided by its average is exponentially distributed. We study the scaling behaviour of the exponent as the number of vertices tends to infinity, deriving upper and lower bounds. We also identify a regime for the magnetic field and the pair potential in which the key hypothesis is satisfied. The critical droplets, representing the saddle points for the crossover, have a size that is of the order of the number of vertices. This is because the random graphs generated by the Configuration Model are expander graphs.

Short Paths for First Passage Percolation on the Complete Graph

We study the complete graph equipped with a topology induced by independent and identically distributed edge weights. The focus of our analysis is on the weight Wn and the number of edges Hn of the minimal weight path between two distinct vertices in the weak disorder regime. We establish novel and simple first and second moment methods using path counting to derive first order asymptotics for the considered quantities. Our results are stated in terms of a sequence of parameters

Entropy-Driven Cutoff Phenomena

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