So far we have considered only the statics of spin glasses. However, the nonergodicity discussed in Sections 3.4 and 3.5 for the SK model suggests that the dynamics of spin glasses is rather unusual, at least below the freezing temperature. One expects transitions over energy barriers between the metastable states discussed in Section 3.5, leading to a new class of very slow relaxation times, some of which become infinite, at least in MFT. In this chapter we introduce the basic models and formal techniques necessary for describing the dynamics of spin glasses, corresponding to what we did for statics in Chapter 2. We focus on Ising systems here, both for the sake of simplicity and because, as we have mentioned, the anisotropic interactions found in most systems which one would expect to be Heisenberg spin glasses make them look rather Ising-like in many of their properties. The Glauber model The classical Ising model has no inherent dynamics, so to make a dynamical model one has to couple the spins to an additional ‘heat bath’ which induces spin flips (Glauber, 1963; Suzuki and Kubo, 1968). For metallic spin glasses this heat bath can be identified with the conduction electrons, which produce single-spin flip processes with the impurity spins via the exchange interaction J sd . For a single magnetic impurity this leads to the so-called Korringa relaxation with relaxation time τ 0 .
A class of infinite-ranged random model Hamiltonians is defined as a limiting case in which the appropriate form of mean-field theory, order parameters and phase diagram to describe spin-glasses may be established. It is believed that these Hamiltonians may be exactly soluble, although a complete solution is not yet available. Thermodynamic properties of the model for Ising and
XY spins are evaluated using a "many-replica" procedure. Results of the replica theory reproduce properties at and above the ordering temperature which are also predicted by high-temperature expansions, but are in error at low temperatures. Extensive computer simulations of infinite-ranged Ising spin-glasses are presented. They confirm the general details of the predicted phase diagram. The errors in the replica solution are found to be small, and confined to low temperatures. For this model, the extended mean-field theory of Thouless, Anderson, and Palmer gives physically sensible low-temperature predictions. These are in quantitative agreement with the Monte Carlo statics. The dynamics of the infinite-ranged Ising spin-glass are studied in a linearized mean-field theory. Critical slowing down is predicted and found, with correlations decaying as ${e}^{{\ensuremath{-}[\frac{(T\ensuremath{-}{T}_{c})}{T}]}^{2}t}$ for
T greater than
Tc, the spin-glass transition temperature. At and below
Tc, spin-spin correlations are observed to decay to their long-time limit as ${t}^{\ensuremath{-}\frac{1}{2}}$.
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=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) 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) 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
d above the upper critical dimension
du, for both free and periodic boundary conditions. For
d>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 fluctuations, while standard FSS applies to
veckneqvec0 fluctuations. Hence the exponent
eta describing the power-law decay of correlations at criticality is unambiguously
eta=0. With free boundary conditions, the finite-size "shift" is greater than the rounding. Nonetheless, using
T−TL, where
TL is the finite-size pseudocritical temperature, as the scaling variable, the data do collapse onto a scaling form that includes the behavior both at
TL, where the susceptibility
chi diverges like
Ld/2, and the bulk
Tc, where it diverges like
L2. We support these claims with data from large-scale simulations of the five-dimensional Ising model.
Renormalization in pure systems In Section 2.2 we reviewed the basic facts about broken symmetry and phase transitions in pure systems, within mean field theory. This helped set the stage for the mean field description of spin glasses that we studied in Chapters 3–6. We will now want to study the phase transition and the nature of the low-temperature phase for spin glasses with fairly short-ranged interactions in low dimensionality (2 or 3). This situation is far from the region where mean field theory is a good guide, so we will have to learn new methods. Again, we start by learning about them in pure systems. Renormalization is a very general approach to problems with many strongly interacting degrees of freedom. In a statistical mechanical problem, the basic idea is to carry out the trace in the partition function over some of the variables, leaving a new problem with fewer degrees of freedom. One follows how the parameters in the Hamiltonian of the system change as this procedure is iterated many times. Generally, the partial trace corresponds to removing the short-distance degrees of freedom, so each successive effective Hamiltonian has a larger lattice constant (or equivalent microscopic length) than its predecessor: each renormalization step corresponds to a change of scale. Different thermodynamic phases are identified with flows to different fixed points in the parameter space of the Hamiltonian under this semigroup.
A class of infinite-ranged random model Hamiltonians is defined as a limiting case in which the appropriate form of mean-field theory, order parameters and phase diagram to describe spin-glasses may be established. It is believed that these Hamiltonians may be exactly soluble, although a complete solution is not yet available. Thermodynamic properties of the model for Ising and
XY spins are evaluated using a many-replica procedure. Results of the replica theory reproduce properties at and above the ordering temperature which are also predicted by high-temperature expansions, but are in error at low temperatures. Extensive computer simulations of infinite-ranged Ising spin-glasses are presented. They confirm the general details of the predicted phase diagram. The errors in the replica solution are found to be small, and confined to low temperatures. For this model, the extended mean-field theory of Thouless, Anderson, and Palmer gives physically sensible low-temperature predictions. These are in quantitative agreement with the Monte Carlo statics. The dynamics of the infinite-ranged Ising spin-glass are studied in a linearized mean-field theory. Critical slowing down is predicted and found, with correlations decaying as ${e}^{{\ensuremath{-}[\frac{(T\ensuremath{-}{T}_{c})}{T}]}^{2}t}$ for
T greater than
Tc, the spin-glass transition temperature. At and below
Tc, spin-spin correlations are observed to decay to their long-time limit as ${t}^{\ensuremath{-}\frac{1}{2}}$.
Spin glasses have been the subject of intense study and considerable controversy for decades, and the low-temperature phase of short-range spin glasses is still poorly understood. Our main goal is to improve our understanding in this area and find an answer to the following question: Are there only a single pair or a countable infinity of pure states in the low temperature phase of the EA spin glass? To that aim we first start by introducing spin glasses and provide a brief history of their research, then proceed to describe our method of simulation, the parallel tempering Monte Carlo algorithm. Next, we present the results of a large-scale numerical study of the equilibrium three-dimensional Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass with Gaussian disorder. In order to understand how the parallel tempering algorithm works, we measure various static, as well as dynamical quantities, such as the autocorrelation times and round-trip times for the parallel tempering Monte Carlo method. We examine the correlation between static and dynamic observables for _ 5000 disorder realizations and up to 1000 spins down to temperatures at 20% of the critical temperature, and our results show that autocorrelation times are directly correlated with the roughness of the free-energy landscape. In the following chapters, the three- and four-dimensional Edwards-Anderson and mean-field Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Ising spin glasses are studied again via large-scale Monte Carlo simulations at low temperatures, deep within the spinglass phase. Performing a careful statistical analysis of several thousand independent disorder realizations and using an observable that detects peaks in the overlap distribution, we show that the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick and Edwards-Anderson models have a distinctly different low-temperature behavior. We arrive to the following conclusion: The structure of the spin-glass overlap distribution for the Edwards-Anderson model suggests that its low-temperature phase has only a single pair of pure states. Finally we present results for several new observables, along with a few preliminary studies and suggestions for future research.