No label defined (Q4343452)

These notes are intended as a guide for some lectures at the CIMPA School at Temuco (Jan/92). The goal of the lectures is to introduce students to large deviations in connection with phase transition phenomena. With this respect the main emphasis is in the connection with metastability from the pathwise point of view. Such approach to metastability in stochastic dynamics has been introduced almost ten years ago, by Cassandro, Galves, Olivieri and Vares. Since then, several results along this line have been obtained and recently a definite and very important step has been performed by Neves and Schonmann, working in the two-dimensional stochastic Ising model. For the moment their results are restricted to the case when the temperature is tending to zero, instead of just being subcritical. By doing so critical dropets have a definite size for small enough magnetic fields, and nucleation to the right phase is rigorously proven. In Chapter 3 we shall study a little bit of their results. Chapter 1 is meant as a quick introduction to large deviations, and in Chapter 2 we discuss some of the known results on the pathwise approach to metastability. A list of several basic references is provided, but with no intention of being extensive, and simply to help the interested student. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0864.00066].