Violation of the Arrhenius law below the transition temperature

Abstract

When interacting spin systems possess non-zero magnetization or topological entanglement entropy below the transition temperature, they often serve as classical or quantum self-correcting memory. In particular, their memory time grows exponentially in the system size due to polynomially growing energy barrier, as in the 2D Ising model and 4D Toric code. Here, we argue that this is not always the case. We demonstrate that memory time of classical clock model (a generalization of ferromagnet to q-state spins) may be polynomially long even when the system possesses finite magnetization. This weak violation of the Arrhenius law occurs above the percolation temperature, but below the transition temperature, a regime where excitation droplets percolate the entire lattice, yet the system retains a finite magnetization. We present numerical evidences for polynomial scaling as well as analytical argument showing that energy barrier is effectively suppressed and is only logarithmically divergent. We also suggest an intriguing possibility of experimentally observing the precession of magnetization vectors at experimentally relevant time scale.