Critical droplets in Metastable States of Probabilistic Cellular Automata

We consider the problem of metastability in a probabilistic cellular automaton (PCA) with a parallel updating rule which is reversible with respect to a Gibbs measure. The dynamical rules contain two parameters $\beta$ and $h$ which resemble, but are not identical to, the inverse temperature and external magnetic field in a ferromagnetic Ising model; in particular, the phase diagram of the system has two stable phases when $\beta$ is large enough and $h$ is zero, and a unique phase when $h$ is nonzero. When the system evolves, at small positive values of $h$, from an initial state with all spins down, the PCA dynamics give rise to a transition from a metastable to a stable phase when a droplet of the favored $+$ phase inside the metastable $-$ phase reaches a critical size. We give heuristic arguments to estimate the critical size in the limit of zero ``temperature'' ($\beta\to\infty$), as well as estimates of the time required for the formation of such a droplet in a finite system. Monte Carlo simulations give results in good agreement with the theoretical predictions.Comment: 5 LaTeX picture

Sum of exit times in a series of two metastable states

The problem of not degenerate in energy metastable states forming a series in the framework of reversible finite state space Markov chains is considered. Metastability has been widely studied both in the mathematical and physical literature. Metastable states arises close to a first order phase transition, when the system can be trapped for a long time (exponentially long with respect to the inverse of the temperature) before switching to the thermodynamically stable phase. In this paper, under rather general conditions, we give a sharp estimate of the exit time from a metastable state in a presence of a second metastable state that must be necessarily visited by the system before eventually reaching the stable phase. In this framework we give a sharp estimate of the exit time from the metastable state at higher energy and, on the proper exponential time scale, we prove an addition rule. As an application of the theory, we study the Blume-Capel model in the zero chemical potential case