Metastability of Synchronous and Asynchronous Dynamics

Metastability is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, which interests several fields of natural sciences. Since metastability is a genuine non-equilibrium phenomenon, its description in the framework of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics has progressed slowly for a long time. Since the publication of the first seminal paper in which the metastable behavior of the mean field Curie–Weiss model was approached by means of stochastic techniques, this topic has been largely studied by the scientific community. Several papers and books have been published in which many different spin models were studied and different approaches were developed. In this review, we focus on the comparison between the metastable behavior of synchronous and asynchronous dynamics, namely, stochastic processes in discrete time in which, at each time, either all the spins or one single spin is updated. In particular, we discuss how two different stochastic implementations of the very same Hamiltonian give rise to different metastable behaviors.