Metastable states of an Ising-like thermally bistable system.

The lifetimes of the metastable states are investigated in an Ising-like model associated with thermally bistable systems. A discrete mesoscopic Markovian dynamic is established using an optimized version of the previously presented Monte Carlo entropic sampling method. This is well suited to an extensive study of the role of the physical parameters: temperature, interaction parameter, electronic energy gap. By combining a discrete Markovian mesoscopic dynamic and the absorbing Markov chain technique, we obtain an analytical access to the average lifetime of the metastable state. One-variable and two-variable approximations for the original microscopic master equation are presented and discussed. A typical difference in the thermal dependence of the lifetime of the low- and the high-temperature metastable states is found, and explained as a consequence of the temperature-dependent field associated with the Ising-like model. The validity, the advantages, and the limits of the method are discussed, as well as the possible consequences on the behavior of spin transition systems. A prospective for a possible phenomenological finite-size scaling is presented.