Metastability for expanding bubbles on a sticky substrate

Abstract

We study the dynamical behavior of a one dimensional interface interacting with a sticky impenetrable substrate or wall. The interface is subject to two effects going in opposite directions. Contacts between the interface and the substrate are given an energetic bonus while an external force with constant intensity pulls the interface away from the wall. Our interface is modeled by the graph of a one-dimensional nearest-neighbor path on ${\mathbb{Z}}_{+}$, starting at 0 and ending at 0 after $2\mathit{N}$ steps, with the wall being the horizontal axis. At equilibrium each path $\mathit{\xi }={({\mathit{\xi }}_{\mathit{x}})}_{\mathit{x}=0}^{2\mathit{N}}$ is given a probability proportional to ${\mathit{\lambda }}^{\mathit{H}(\mathit{\xi })}exp(\frac{\mathit{\sigma }}{\mathit{N}}\mathit{A}(\mathit{\xi }))$, where $\mathit{H}(\mathit{\xi }):=\mathrm{\#}\{\mathit{x}:{\mathit{\xi }}_{\mathit{x}}=0\}$ and $\mathit{A}(\mathit{\xi })$ is the area enclosed between the path ξ and the x-axis. We then consider the classical heat-bath dynamics which equilibrates the value of each ${\mathit{\xi }}_{\mathit{x}}$ at a constant rate via corner-flip.

Investigating the statics of the model, we derive the full phase diagram in λ and σ of this model, and identify the critical line which separates a localized phase where the pinning force sticks the interface to the wall and a delocalized one, for which the external force stabilizes ξ around a deterministic shape at a macroscopic distance of the wall. On the dynamical side, we identify a second critical line, which separates a rapidly mixing phase (for which the system mixes in polynomial time) to a slow phase where the mixing time grows exponentially. In this slowly mixing regime, we obtain a sharp estimate of the mixing time on the log scale, and provide evidences of a metastable behavior.