Pointwise estimates and exponential laws in metastable systems via coupling methods (Q662435)

Loosely speaking, a metastable system is characterized by the fact that its state space can be partitioned into several disjoint subsets, with the property that the transition times between them are long compared with the scaling time within each subset. The present paper studies the metastability of a class of stochastic Ising models by using standard coupling techniques which are generalized to analyze random field models. Glauber dynamics and the random field Curie-Weiss model are a central part of the paper.