The Spectral Gap of the 2-D Stochastic Ising Model with Mixed Boundary Conditions

We establish upper bounds for the spectral gap of the stochastic Ising model at low temperatures in an l×l box with boundary conditions which are not purely plus or minus; specifically, we assume the magnitude of the sum of the boundary spins over each interval of length l in the boundary is bounded by l, where <1. We show that for any such boundary condition, when the temperature is sufficiently low (depending on ), the spectral gap decreases exponentially in l.