Properties of metastable ising models evolving under the Swendsen-Wang dynamics

The behavior of the metastable nearest neighbor Ising model governed by Swendsen-Wang dynamics (SW) is investigated ind=2. The results are compared to those obtained in standard Metropolis dynamics. Both the SW and Metropolis systems are observed to decay from the metastable state via the formation of nucleating droplets. Nucleation rates are measured and found to agree with those predicted by classical nucleation theory. The growth rates of the droplets are observed to differ between the two dynamics. In addition, the dynamic critical exponentz is measured in a mean-field (Curie-Weiss) metastable Ising model at the spinodal. It is found that for SW dynamics,z=2. Since this is the same value as that obtained in the Metropolis case, this result shows that SW does not change the dynamical universality class at the spinodal.