Sum of exit times in series of metastable states in Probabilistic Cellular Automata

Abstract

Reversible Probabilistic Cellular Automata are a special class of automata whose stationary behavior is described by Gibbs-like measures. For those models the dynamics can be trapped for a very long time in states which are very different from the ones typical of stationarity. This phenomenon can be recasted in the framework of metastability theory which is typical of Statistical Mechanics. In this paper we consider a model presenting two not degenerate in energy metastable states which form a series, in the sense that, when the dynamics is started at one of them, before reaching stationarity, the system must necessarily visit the second one. We discuss a rule for combining the exit times from each of the metastable states.