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Physical review. B, Condensed matter

Equilibrium behavior of the spin-glass ordered phase

Daniel S. Fisher, David A. Huse

Published Jul 1, 1988• 925 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A phenomenological theory of the ordered phase of short-range Ising spin glasses is developed in terms of droplet excitations and presented in detail. These excitations have free energies with a broad distribution whose characteristic magnitude grows with length scale L as ${L}^{\ensuremath{\theta}}$. A small fraction of droplets of all scales are thermally active; these dominate much of the physics. The mean-square correlation functions are found to decay with distance as 1/${r}^{\ensuremath{\theta}}$ for all T${T}_{c}$ and the autocorrelations decay logarithmically with time because of large activation barriers for creation and annihilation of the droplet excitations. A renormalization procedure is sketched in order to define excitations at positive temperature. It is found that the long-distance equilibrium correlation functions are extremely sensitive to small temperature changes, yielding breakdown of certain relations between fluctuations and thermodynamic derivatives. The behavior near to the critical temperature is discussed and some of the ideas are extended to systems with power-law interactions and to spin glasses with X-Y or Heisenberg symmetry. The inequality \ensuremath{\theta}\ensuremath{\le}(d-1)/2 is also derived.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.38.386

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Physical review. B, Condensed matter•Dec 1, 1985•773 citations
A phenomenological theory of the ordered phase of short-range Ising spin glasses is developed in terms of droplet excitations and presented in detail. These excitations have free energies with a broad distribution whose characteristic magnitude grows with length scale L as L\ensuremathθ{L}^{\ensuremath{\theta}}L\ensuremathθ. A small fraction of droplets of all scales are thermally active; these dominate much of the physics. The mean-square correlation functions are found to decay with distance as 1/r\ensuremathθ{r}^{\ensuremath{\theta}}r\ensuremathθ for all TTc{T}_{c}Tc​ and the autocorrelations decay logarithmically with time because of large activation barriers for creation and annihilation of the droplet excitations. A renormalization procedure is sketched in order to define excitations at positive temperature. It is found that the long-distance equilibrium correlation functions are extremely sensitive to small temperature changes, yielding breakdown of certain relations between fluctuations and thermodynamic derivatives. The behavior near to the critical temperature is discussed and some of the ideas are extended to systems with power-law interactions and to spin glasses with X-Y or Heisenberg symmetry. The inequality \ensuremath{\theta}\ensuremath{\le}(d-1)/2 is also derived.
We consider the nonequilibrium behavior of the spin-glass ordered phase within the droplet scaling theory introduced previously. The fundamental long-time nonequilibrium process is assumed to be the thermally activated growth of spin-glass ordered domains. The remanent magnetization, m(t), in zero field is found to decay at long times as m(t)\ensuremath{\sim}${R}_{t}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\ensuremath{\lambda}}$, where Rt{R}_{t}Rt​\ensuremath{\sim}(lnt${)}^{1/\ensuremath{\psi}}$ is the linear domain size, \ensuremath{\psi} is the previously introduced barrier exponent describing the growth of activation-barrier heights with length scale, and \ensuremath{\lambda} is a new nonequilibrium dynamic exponent, satisfying the relation \ensuremath{\lambda}\ensuremath{\ge}d/2 for d-dimensional systems. The effects of waiting for partial equilibration before making a measurement are studied in various regimes. The effects of quenching first to one temperature and then to another are also examined. Such experiments can, in principle, be used to obtain information about the relative rate of dynamic evolution as well as the overlap between the equilibrium states at different temperatures. In particular, the length scale ${L}_{\ensuremath{\Delta}T}$, below which equilibrium correlations at temperatures T and T+\ensuremath{\Delta}T are similar, plays an important role. The decay of m(t) and the growth of spin-glass order after a quench are examined in Monte Carlo simulations of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model.
We propose a new picture of the Ising-spin-glass phase, based on an Ansatz for the scaling of low-lying large-scale-droplet excitations. We find behavior very different from the infinite-range model. The truncated spatial correlations decay as a power of distance, the ac nonlinear susceptibility diverges as a power of $\mathrm{ln}\ensuremath{\omega}$, and the magnetization noise power diverges as $\frac{1}{\ensuremath{\omega}}$ with logarithmic corrections. A magnetic field destroys the spin-glass phase so that there is no de Almeida-Thouless transition. Defect excitations should yield similar dynamic phenomena in vector spin-glasses.
Aging phenomena of short-range Ising spin glass models have been investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. It is found that in the low-temperature spin-glass phase the mean domain size exhibits a crossover from a power-law growth associated with the critical fluctuation at the transition temperature to slower growth inherent in the low-temperature phase. The temperature dependence of the growth law of the domain size can be almost explained by this crossover. We also find that the spin-autocorrelation function in the quasi-equilibrium regime follows the expected scaling behavior from the droplet theory expressed in terms of the mean domain size and a characteristic length scale of droplet excitations.
Despite decades of effort, our understanding of low-temperature phase of spin glass models with short-range interactions remains incomplete. Replica symmetry breaking (RSB) theory, based on the solution of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick mean-field model, predicts many pure states; meanwhile, competing theories of short-range systems, such as the droplet picture, predict a single pair of pure states related by time-reversal symmetry, analogously to the ferromagnet. Since RSB certainly holds for the mean-field (infinite-range) model, it is interesting to study short-range models in high dimensions to observe whether RSB also holds here; however, computer simulations of short-range models in high dimensions are difficult because the number of spins to equilibrate grows so rapidly with the linear size of the system.A relatively recent idea which has been fruitful is to instead study one-dimensional models with long-range (power-law) interactions, which are argued to have the same critical behavior as corresponding short-range models in high dimensions, but for which simulations for a range of sizes (crucial for finite-size scaling analysis) are feasible. For these one-dimensional long-range (1DLR) models, we fill in a previously unexplored region of parameter space where the interactions become sufficiently long-range that they must be rescaled with the system size to maintain the thermodynamic limit. We find strong evidence that detailed behavior of the 1DLR models everywhere in this "nonextensive regime" is identical to that of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, lending support to a recent conjecture.In an attempt to distinguish the RSB and droplet pictures, we study recently-proposed observables based on the statistics of individual disorder samples, rather than simply averaging over the disorder as is most frequently done in previous studies. We compare Monte Carlo results for 1DLR models which are proxies for short-range models in 3, 4, and 10 dimensions with previously-obtained data for the 3D and 4D short-range models and the SK model. For one statistic, which is expected to sharply distinguish between the two pictures in the thermodynamic limit, we find that larger system sizes than those currently feasible to simulate are needed to obtain an unambiguous result. We also find that two other recently-proposed statistics, the median of the cumulative overlap distribution and the "typical" overlap distribution, are not particularly helpful in distinguishing between the RSB and droplet pictures.If there are many pure states in the spin-glass phase, we need to carry out some sort of statistical average over them to obtain the thermodynamics. One such prescription for doing this is called the "metastate." Motivated by similarities between the average over pure states specified by the metastate theory and that presumably generated by the nonequilibrium dynamics, we study a 1DLR model which is a proxy for a short-range model in d=8d=8d=8 dimensions and measure the evolution of dynamical correlations. We find that the spatial decay of the correlations at distances less than the dynamical correlation length xi(t)\\xi(t)xi(t) agrees quantitatively with the predictions of the metastate theory, evaluated according to the RSB picture. We also compute the dynamic exponent defined by xi(t)proptot1/z(T)\\xi(t) \\propto t^{1/z(T)}xi(t)proptot1/z(T) and find that it is compatible with the mean-field value of the critical dynamical exponent for short-range spin glasses.Finally, we present a unified view of finite-size scaling (FSS) in dimensions ddd above the upper critical dimension dud_udu​, for both free and periodic boundary conditions. For d>dud>d_ud>du​, a dangerous irrelevant variable is responsible for both the violation of hyperscaling and the violation of "standard" FSS. We find that the modified hyperscaling proposed to allow for this applies only to veck=vec0\\vec{k}=\\vec{0}veck=vec0 fluctuations, while standard FSS applies to veckneqvec0\\vec{k}\\neq\\vec{0}veckneqvec0 fluctuations. Hence the exponent eta\\etaeta describing the power-law decay of correlations at criticality is unambiguously eta=0\\eta=0eta=0. With free boundary conditions, the finite-size "shift" is greater than the rounding. Nonetheless, using T−TLT-T_LT−TL​, where TLT_LTL​ is the finite-size pseudocritical temperature, as the scaling variable, the data do collapse onto a scaling form that includes the behavior both at TLT_LTL​, where the susceptibility chi\\chichi diverges like Ld/2L^{d/2}Ld/2, and the bulk TcT_cTc​, where it diverges like L2L^2L2. We support these claims with data from large-scale simulations of the five-dimensional Ising model.
Aging phenomena of short-range Ising spin glass models have been investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. It is found that in the low-temperature spin-glass phase the mean domain size exhibits a crossover from a power-law growth associated with the critical fluctuation at the transition temperature to slower growth inherent in the low-temperature phase. The temperature dependence of the growth law of the domain size can be almost explained by this crossover. We also find that the spin-autocorrelation function in the quasi-equilibrium regime follows the expected scaling behavior from the droplet theory expressed in terms of the mean domain size and a characteristic length scale of droplet excitations. Spin glasses (SG) exhibit characteristic slow dynamics below the SG transition temperature. 1)-3) Recently such slow dynamics, in particular aging phenomena, has been much attractive both in experimental and theoretical studies. Several attempts have been made so far to explain the slow dynamics. There are mainly two distinct
I present an analysis of the dynamic behavior of short-range Ising spin glasses observed in stochastic simulations. The time dependence of the order parameter q(t)=〈Sx{S}_{x}Sx​(0)Sx{S}_{x}Sx​(t)〉\ifmmode\bar\else\textasciimacron\fi{}---which is the same as that of the structure factor---and the time dependence of the related dynamic correlation functions have been recorded with good statistics and very long observation times. The spin-glass model with a symmetric distribution of discrete nearest-neighbor \ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}J interactions on a simple-cubic lattice was used. Simulations were performed with a special fast computer, allowing for the first-time investigation of the equilibrium dynamics for a wide range of temperatures (0.7\ensuremath{\le}kT/J\ensuremath{\le}5.0) and lattice sizes (83{8}^{3}83, 163{16}^{3}163, 323{32}^{3}323, and 643{64}^{3}643). I have found that the empirical formula q(t)=${\mathrm{ct}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}x}$exp(-\ensuremath{\omega}${t}^{\ensuremath{\beta}}$) with temperature-dependent exponents x(T) and \ensuremath{\beta}(T) describes the decay very well at all temperatures above the spin-glass transition. In the spin-glass phase, only the algebraic decay q(t)=${\mathrm{ct}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}x}$ could be observed, with different temperature dependences of the exponent x(T). The dynamic scaling hypothesis and finite-size scaling explain well the observed temperature and size dependence of the data, and the functional form of the correlation functions is com- patible with the scaling form if corrections to scaling are taken into account. The scaling behavior and the dynamic and static critical exponents found in my simulations are in reasonable agreement with recent experiments performed on insulating spin glasses, showing that despite its simplicity the discrete model of spin glasses analyzed in this work displays behavior similar to that seen in nature.