Related papers: Metastability for general dynamics with rare trans…
Metastability is an ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, which interests several fields of natural sciences. Its description in the framework of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics has been a taboo for long time since it is a genuine…
A family $\{Q_{\beta}\}_{\beta \geq 0}$ of Markov chains is said to exhibit $\textit{metastable mixing}$ with $\textit{modes}$ $S_{\beta}^{(1)},\ldots,S_{\beta}^{(k)}$ if its spectral gap (or some other mixing property) is very close to the…
In this letter we announce rigorous results that elucidate the relation between metastable states and low-lying eigenvalues in Markov chains in a much more general setting and with considerable greater precision as was so far available.…
In this paper we consider Markov chains with transition rates that depend on a small parameter $\varepsilon$. Under a mild assumption on the asymptotics of these transition rates, we describe the behavior of the chain at various…
Stochastic systems often exhibit multiple viable metastable states that are long-lived. Over very long timescales, fluctuations may push the system to transition between them, drastically changing its macroscopic configuration. In realistic…
Metastability is a phenomenon observed in stochastic systems which stay in a false-equilibrium within a region of its state space until the occurrence of a sequence of rare events that leads to an abrupt transition to a different region.…
We consider a random walk with catastrophes which was introduced to model population biology. It is known that this Markov chain gets eventually absorbed at $0$ for all parameter values. Recently, it has been shown that this chain exhibits…
Many systems across the sciences evolve through a combination of multiplicative growth and diffusive transport. In the presence of disorder, these systems tend to form localized structures which alternate between long periods of relative…
A central concern across the natural sciences is a quantitative understanding of the mechanism governing rare transitions between two metastable states. Recent research has uncovered a fundamental equality between the time-reversal…
We study a class of Markov chains that describe reversible stochastic dynamics of a large class of disordered mean field models at low temperatures. Our main purpose is to give a precise relation between the metastable time scales in the…
Cellular Automata are discrete--time dynamical systems on a spatially extended discrete space which provide paradigmatic examples of nonlinear phenomena. Their stochastic generalizations, i.e., Probabilistic Cellular Automata, are discrete…
We present a comparative study of several dynamical systems of increasing complexity, namely, the logistic map with additive noise, one, two and many globally-coupled standard maps, and the Hamiltonian Mean Field model (i.e., the classical…
Metastability, characterized by a variability of regimes in time, is a ubiquitous type of neural dynamics. It has been formulated in many different ways in the neuroscience literature, however, which may cause some confusion. In this…
We consider a simple but important class of metastable discrete time Markov chains, which we call perturbed Markov chains. Basically, we assume that the transition matrices depend on a parameter $\varepsilon$, and converge as $\varepsilon$.…
Random metastability occurs when an externally forced or noisy system possesses more than one state of apparent equilibrium. This work investigates fluctuations in a class of random dynamical systems, arising from randomly perturbing a…
We study a large class of reversible Markov chains with discrete state space and transition matrix $P_N$. We define the notion of a set of {\it metastable points} as a subset of the state space $\G_N$ such that (i) this set is reached from…
Systems of stochastic particles evolving in a multi-well energy landscape and attracted to their barycenter is the prototypical example of mean-field process undergoing phase transitions: at low temperature, the corresponding mean-field…
Dynamical fluctuations or rare events associated with atypical trajectories in chaotic maps due to specific initial conditions can crucially determine their fate, as the may lead to stability islands or regions in phase space otherwise…
We present a general framework to study the metastability of random perturbations of dynamical systems. It integrates techniques from the theory of Markov processes, in particular the resolvent approach to metastability, with the spectral…
In the last decades the problem of metastability has been attacked on rigorous grounds via many different approaches and techniques which are briefly reviewed in this paper. It is then useful to understand connections between different…