Lectures on Glauber Dynamics for Discrete Spin Models

Abstract

These notes have been the subject of a course I gave in the summer 1997 for the school in probability theory in Saint-Flour. I review in a self-contained way the state of the art, sometimes providing new and simpler proofs of the most relevant results, of the theory of Glauber dynamics for classical lattice spin models of statistical mechanics. The material covers the dynamics in the one phase region, in the presence of boundary phase transitions, in the phase coexistence region for the two dimensional Ising model and in the so-called Griffiths phase for random Systems.