Rotating states in driven clock- and XY-models (Q648135)

One important topic in non-equilibrium phase transitions is the description of the changes to the equilibrium phase diagram when a steady non-equilibrium driving is imposed on the system. In this paper, a uniform non-equilibrium force drives the rotation of 3D planar rotating spins placed on the sites of a regular lattice, with an interaction between the spins of XY-type, namely, the interaction Hamiltonian is proportional to the cosine of the difference of their corresponding rotation angles. The authors discuss the modification of the space diagram of this system when the driving induces biased rotation of the spins over the circle. In particular, they address three main aspects: (a) the uniqueness of the stationary distribution accompanied by breakdown of ergodicity (in the sense that some initial data do not relax); (b) the presence of macroscopic dynamical coherence; and (c) the stability of equilibrium phases against small non-equilibrium driving. They assume an \(N\)-clock model (i.e., each rotator may have \(N\) states in the circle). Starting from a theorem by \textit{J. Frölich, R. Israel, E. H. Lieb} and \textit{B. Simon} [``Phase transitions and reflection positivity. I. General theory and long range lattice models'', Commun. Math. Phys. 62, No. 1, 1--34 (1978; \url{doi:10.1007/BF01940327})], they make four conjectures for the driven clock model (without detailed balance) about its behaviour in terms of the values of the drift and the temperature. In particular, they conjecture that there are two low-temperature regimes. At very low temperatures and for small enough drift, the phase diagram is a small perturbation of the equilibrium one. However, at larger temperatures, massless modes appear and the spins start to rotate synchronously for arbitrary small drift. The main result of the paper is the proof that there is essentially a unique translation-invariant, and stationary distribution despite the fact that the dynamics is not ergodic. The authors comment that this result could be the first truly non-degenerate example of a non-ergodic discrete-time dynamics.