Metastability of the Ising model on random regular graphs at zero temperature

Abstract

We study the metastability of the ferromagnetic Ising model on a random $r$-regular graph in the zero temperature limit. We prove that in the presence of a small positive external field the time that it takes to go from the all minus state to the all plus state behaves like ${\exp(\beta (r/2+ \mathcal{O}(\sqrt{r}))n)}$ when the inverse temperature $\beta\rightarrow\infty$ and the number of vertices $n$ is large enough but fixed. The proof is based on the so-called pathwise approach and bounds on the isoperimetric number of random regular graphs.