Summary: This is the second in a series of three papers in which we study a two-dimensional lattice gas consisting of two types of particles subject to Kawasaki dynamics at low temperature in a large finite box with an open boundary. Each pair of particles occupying neighboring sites has a negative binding energy provided their types are different, while each particle has a positive activation energy that depends on its type. There is no binding energy between particles of the same type. At the boundary of the box, particles are created and annihilated in a way that represents the presence of an infinite gas reservoir. We start the dynamics from the empty box and are interested in the transition time to the full box. This transition is triggered by a critical droplet appearing somewhere in the box.
In the first paper [“Metastability for Kawasaki dynamics at low temperature with two types of particles”, Electron. J. Probab. 17, 1–26 (2012; doi:10.1214/EJP.v17-1693)], we identified the parameter range for which the system is metastable, showed that the first entrance distribution on the set of critical droplets is uniform, computed the expected transition time up to and including a multiplicative factor of order one, and proved that the nucleation time divided by its expectation is exponentially distributed, all in the limit of low temperature. These results were proved under three hypotheses, and involve three model-dependent quantities: energy, shape and number of critical droplets. In the second paper [“Kawasaki dynamics with two types of particles: critical droplets”, in preparation], we prove the first and the second hypothesis and identify the energy of critical droplets. In the third paper, we settle the rest.
Both the second and the third paper deal with understanding the geometric properties of subcritical, critical and supercritical droplets, which are crucial in determining the metastable behavior of the system, as explained in the first paper. The geometry turns out to be considerably more complex than for Kawasaki dynamics with one type of particle, for which an extensive literature exists. The main motivation behind our work is to understand metastability of multi-type particle systems.