Metastability of synchronous and asynchronous dynamics

Abstract: Metastability is an ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, which interests several fields of natural sciences. Its description in the framework of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics has been a taboo for long time since it is a genuine non--equilibrium phenomenon. Since the publication of the first seminal paper in which the metastable behavior of the mean field Curie--Weiss model was approached by means of stochastic techniques, this topic has been largely studied by the scientific community. Several papers and books have been published in which many different spin models were studied and different approaches were developed. In this review we focus on the comparison between the metastable behavior of synchronous and asynchronous dynamics, namely, stochastic processes in discrete time in which at each time either all the spins or one single spin are updated. In particular we discuss how the two different stochastic implementation of the very same Hamiltonian give rise to different metastable behaviors.