Tunneling and Metastability of continuous time Markov chains

Johel Beltran (1) , Claudio Landim (2)

1 PUCP - Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú = Pontifical Catholic University of Peru
2 LMRS - Laboratoire de Mathématiques Raphaël Salem

We propose a new definition of metastability of Markov processes on countable state spaces. We obtain sufficient conditions for a sequence of processes to be metastable. In the reversible case these conditions are expressed in terms of the capacity and of the stationary measure of the metastable states.

Mots clés: Meta-stability; Markov processes; condensation; zero-range processes

Domaines: Probabilités [math.PR]

Johel Beltran, Claudio Landim. Tunneling and Metastability of continuous time Markov chains. 2009. ⟨hal-00425459⟩