Slow Cooling of an Ising Ferromagnet

Abstract

A ferromagnetic Ising chain which is endowed with a single-spin-flip Glauber dynamics is investigated. For an arbitrary annealing protocol, we derive an exact integral equation for the domain wall density. This integral equation admits an asymptotic solution in the limit of extremely slow cooling. For instance, we extract an asymptotic of the density of domain walls at the end of the cooling procedure when the temperature vanishes. Slow annealing is usually studied using a Kibble-Zurek argument; in our setting, this argument leads to approximate predictions which are in good agreement with exact asymptotics.