Small Window Overlaps Are Effective Probes of Replica Symmetry Breaking in 3D Spin Glasses

We compute numerically small window overlaps in the three dimensional Edwards Anderson spin glass. We show that they behave in the way implied by the Replica Symmetry Breaking Ansatz, that they do not qualitatively differ from the full volume overlap and do not tend to a trivial function when increasing the lattice volume. On the contrary we show they are affected by small finite volume effects, and are interesting tools for the study of the features of the spin glass phase.Comment: 9 pages plus 5 figure

Equilibrium valleys in spin glasses at low temperature

We investigate the 3-dimensional Edwards-Anderson spin glass model at low temperature on simple cubic lattices of sizes up to L=12. Our findings show a strong continuity among T>0 physical features and those found previously at T=0, leading to a scenario with emerging mean field like characteristics that are enhanced in the large volume limit. For instance, the picture of space filling sponges seems to survive in the large volume limit at T>0, while entropic effects play a crucial role in determining the free-energy degeneracy of our finite volume states. All of our analysis is applied to equilibrium configurations obtained by a parallel tempering on 512 different disorder realizations. First, we consider the spatial properties of the sites where pairs of independent spin configurations differ and we introduce a modified spin overlap distribution which exhibits a non-trivial limit for large L. Second, after removing the Z_2 (+-1) symmetry, we cluster spin configurations into valleys. On average these valleys have free-energy differences of O(1), but a difference in the (extensive) internal energy that grows significantly with L; there is thus a large interplay between energy and entropy fluctuations. We also find that valleys typically differ by sponge-like space filling clusters, just as found previously for low-energy system-size excitations above the ground state.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, RevTeX format. Clarifications and additional reference

On the approach to equilibrium of an Hamiltonian chain of anharmonic oscillators

In this note we study the approach to equilibrium of a chain of anharmonic oscillators. We find indications that a sufficiently large system always relaxes to the usual equilibrium distribution. There is no sign of an ergodicity threshold. The time however to arrive to equilibrium diverges when $g \to 0$, $g$ being the anharmonicity.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Violation of the Fluctuation Dissipation Theorem in Finite Dimensional Spin Glasses

We study the violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in the three and four dimensional Gaussian Ising spin glasses using on and off equilibrium simulations. We have characterized numerically the function X(C) that determine the violation and we have studied its scaling properties. Moreover we have computed the function x(C) which characterize the breaking of the replica symmetry directly from equilibrium simulations. The two functions are numerically equal and in this way we have established that the conjectured connection between the violation of fluctuation dissipation theorem in the off-equilibrium dynamics and the replica symmetry breaking at equilibrium holds for finite dimensional spin glasses. These results point to a spin glass phase with spontaneously broken replica symmetry in finite dimensional spin glasses.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, also available at http://chimera.roma1.infn.it/index_papers_complex.htm

Comment on "Ising Spin Glasses in a Magnetic Field"

In ref. cond-mat/9811419 Houdayer and Martin analyze the T=0 3d EA spin glass with a magnetic field $B$. By using a new, powerful method, they determine an effective critical field $B_c$ as a function of the lattice size $L$. They use their results to deduce that the model is behaving like in the droplet approach and not like the mean-field theory. We show here, by using some unpublished data, that this very interesting method and numerical results are completely compatible with the behavior implied by the Replica Symmetry Breaking theory.Comment: One page comment about ref. cond-mat/9811419, including two eps figure

Off-Equilibrium Dynamics at Very Low Temperatures in 3d Spin Glasses

We present a high statistic systematic study of the overlap correlation function well below the critical temperature in the three dimensional Gaussian spin glass. The off-equilibrium correlation function has been studied confirming the power law behavior for the dynamical correlation length. In particular we have computed the dynamical critical exponent $z$ in a wide range of temperatures, $0.35 \le T \le 0.9$, obtaining a dependence $z(T)=6.2/T$ in a very good agreement with recent experiments. Moreover, we report a study of the violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem for very low temperatures $T=0.5$ and $T=0.35$. All our numerical results avoid a droplet model interpretation even when $T$ is as low as $T=0.35$.Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages and 5 figures. A minor arithmetic error corrected and references update