Convergence rates of Markov chains for some self-assembly and non-saturated Ising models (Q1008719)

The authors define the non-saturated Ising model to represent a simple DNA-based self-assembly model consisting of two types of tiles. It is shown that the assembly is efficient at high temperatures, where the stationary distribution allows many ``errors'' or unfavorable neighbors, and the assembly is slow at low temperatures, where errors are much less likely.