Protecting information via probabilistic cellular automata

Probabilistic cellular automata describe the dynamics of classical spin models, which, for sufficiently small temperature T, can serve as classical memory capable of storing information even in the presence of nonzero external magnetic field h. In this article, we study a recently introduced probabilistic cellular automaton, the sweep rule, and map out a region of two coexisting stable phases in the (T,h) plane. We also find that the sweep rule belongs to the weak two-dimensional Ising universality class. Our work is a step towards understanding how simple geometrically local error-correction strategies can protect information encoded into complex noisy systems, such as topological quantum error-correcting codes.