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Physical Review Letters

Ordered Phase of Short-Range Ising Spin-Glasses

Daniel S. Fisher, David A. Huse

Published Apr 14, 1986• 806 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.56.1601

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•Jan 1, 2015•3 citations
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 ln\ensuremathω\mathrm{ln}\ensuremath{\omega}ln\ensuremathω, and the magnetization noise power diverges as 1\ensuremathω\frac{1}{\ensuremath{\omega}}\ensuremathω1​ 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.
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 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 study in Ising spin glasses the finite-size effects near the spin-glass transition in zero field and at the de Almeida-Thouless transition in a field by Monte Carlo methods and by analytical approximations. In zero field, the finite-size scaling function associated with the spin-glass susceptibility of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick mean-field spin-glass model is of the same form as that of one-dimensional spin-glass models with power-law long-range interactions in the regime where they can be a proxy for the Edwards-Anderson short-range spin-glass model above the upper critical dimension. We also calculate a simple analytical approximation for the spin-glass susceptibility crossover function. The behavior of the spin-glass susceptibility near the de Almeida-Thouless transition line has also been studied, but here we have only been able to obtain analytically its behavior in the asymptotic limit above and below the transition. We have also simulated the one-dimensional system in a field in the non-mean-field regime to illustrate that when the Imry-Ma droplet length scale exceeds the system size one can then be erroneously lead to conclude that there is a de Almeida-Thouless transition even though it is absent.
The nature of static chaos in Ising spin glasses is studied. For the problem of chaos with magnetic field, scaling relations in the case of the SK model and short-range models are presented. Our results also suggest that if there is de Almeida-Thouless line then it is similar to that of mean-field theory for d=4 and close to the h=0 axis for d=3. We estimate the lower critical dimension to be in the range 2.7-2.9. Numerical studies at d=4 show that there is chaos against temperature changes dT and the correlation length diverges like 1/dT.
The stability of the spin-glass phase against a magnetic field is studied in the three- and four-dimensional Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glasses. Effective couplings J(eff) and effective fields H(eff) associated with length scale L are measured by a numerical domain-wall renormalization-group method. The results obtained by scaling analysis of the data strongly indicate the existence of a crossover length beyond which the spin-glass order is destroyed by field H. The crossover length well obeys a power law of H which diverges as H --> 0 but remains finite for any nonzero H, implying that the spin-glass phase is absent even in an infinitesimal field. These results are well consistent with the droplet theory for short-range spin glasses.
We have studied the diluted Heisenberg spin glass model in a 3-component random field for the commonly-used one-dimensional long-range model where the probability that two spins separated by a distance rrr interact with one another falls as 1/r2σ1/r^{2 σ}1/r2σ, for two values of σσσ, 0.750.750.75 and 0.850.850.85. No de Almeida-Thouless line is expected at these σσσ values. The spin glass correlation length ξSGξ_{\text{SG}}ξSG​ varies with the random field as expected from the Imry-Ma argument and the droplet scaling picture of spin glasses. However, when ξSGξ_{\text{SG}}ξSG​ becomes comparable to the system size LLL, there are departures which we attribute to the features deriving from the TNT picture of spin glasses. For the case σ=0.85σ=0.85σ=0.85 these features go away for system sizes with L>L∗L >L^*L>L∗, where L∗L^*L∗ is large (≈4000−8000\approx 4000-8000≈4000−8000 lattice spacings). In the case of σ=0.75σ= 0.75σ=0.75 we have been unable to study large enough systems to determine its value of L∗L^*L∗. We sketch a renormalization group scenario to explain how these features could arise. On this scenario finite size effects on the droplet scaling picture in low-dimensional spin glasses produce TNT features and some aspects of Parisi's replica symmetry breaking theory of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model.
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.