Spectral gap critical exponent for Glauber dynamics of hierarchical spin models (Q2297311)

The goal of this paper is to investigate the dynamical relaxation of hierarchical models near and at the critical point by deriving the scaling of the spectral gap in terms of the temperature (or the equivalent parameter of the model) and the system size. The authors develop a renormalisation group approach to deriving the asymptotics of the spectral gap of the generator of Glauber-type dynamics of spin systems with strong correlations (at and near a critical point). A spectral gap inequality is derived for the measure recursively in terms of spectral gap inequalities for a sequence of renormalised measures. The authors consider hierarchical versions of the 4-dimensional \(n\)-component \(|\varphi|^4\) model at the critical point and its approach from the high temperature side, and of the 2-dimensional sine-Gordon and the discrete Gaussian models in the rough phase (Kosterlitz-Thouless phase). It is shown that the spectral gap decays polynomially like the spectral gap of the dynamics of a free field (with a logarithmic correction for the \(|\varphi|^4\) model), the scaling limit of these models in equilibrium.