Approach to Fixation for Zero-Temperature Stochastic Ising Models on the Hexagonal Lattice

Abstract

We investigate zero-temperature dynamics on the hexagonal lattice H for the homogeneous ferromagnetic Ising model with zero external magnetic field and a disordered ferromagnetic Ising model with a positive external magnetic field h. We consider both continuous time (asynchronous) processes and, in the homogeneous case, also discrete time synchronous dynamics (i.e., a deterministic cellular automaton), alternating between two sublattices of H. The state space consists of assignments of -1 or +1 to each site of H, and the processes are zero-temperature limits of stochastic Ising ferromagnets with Glauber dynamics and a random (i.i.d. Bernoulli) spin configuration at time 0. We study the speed of convergence of the configuration ${\sigma }^t$ at time t to its limit ${\sigma }^{\infty }$ and related issues.

20 pages, to appear in "In and out of equilibrium: probability with a physics flavor", Progress in Probability, Birkhauser