Tunneling in two dimensions (Q883023)

Tunnelling in dimension two is mainly focused on the analysis of the Glauber dynamics of ferromagnetic Ising model at low temperatures when an external magnetic field \(h>0\) is presented and the initial state is close to the minus Gibbs state at \(h=0\). There are two usual steps to study tunnelling: the first one is based on a loss of memory property. The second step requires to solve a variational problem involving the large deviations rate function. The present paper is devoted to the second step. Here it is considered the two dimensional spatial domain, which is square of side \(L\) with reflecting boundary conditions. For \(L\) large enough the penalty for tunnelling from the minus to the plus equilibrium states is determined. It is fully characterized minimizing sequences, and shown that they have approximately a planar symmetry and follow the one-dimensional manifolds connecting saddle and stable points, first in the time reverse direction and the after crossing the saddle, along the forward time direction. Thus departing from the Wulff shape in the initial and final stages of the tunnelling. The paper contains 8 sections and appendix. Sections 3--8 devoted to the proof of the main results of the paper. The extension of the results to \(d=3\) is sketched in the Appendix (Sec. 11).