Annalen der Physik
Energy barriers of spin glasses from multi‐overlap simulations
Wolfhard Janke E, Bernd A. Berg, Alain H. Billoire
Abstract
Abstract We report large‐scale simulations of the three‐dimensional Edwards‐Anderson Ising spin glass system using the recently introduced multi‐overlap Monte Carlo algorithm. In this approach the temperature is fixed and two replica are coupled through a weight factor such that a broad distribution of the Parisi overlap parameter q is achieved. Canonical expectation values for the entire q ‐range (multi‐overlap) follow by reweighting. We present an analysis of the performance of the algorithm and in particular discuss results on spin glass free‐energy barriers which are hard to obtain with conventional algorithms. In addition we discuss the non‐trivial scaling behavior of the canonical q ‐distributions in the broken phase.