Numerical study of barriers and valleys in the free-energy landscape of spin glasses

Abstract

We study the problem of glassy relaxations in the presence of an external field in the highly controlled context of a spin-glass simulation. We consider a small spin glass in three dimensions (specifically, a lattice of size L=8, small enough to be equilibrated through a Parallel Tempering simulations at low temperatures, deep in the spin glass phase). After equilibrating the sample, an external field is switched on, and the subsequent dynamics is studied. The field turns out to reduce the relaxation time, but huge statistical fluctuations are found when different samples are compared. After taking care of these fluctuations we find that the expected linear regime is very narrow. Nevertheless, when regarded as a purely numerical method, we find that the external field is extremely effective in reducing the relaxation times.

22 pages, 10 figures; Published version

References in corpus (9)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Supercooled Liquids for Pedestrians
• Models and algorithms for the next generation of glass transition studies
• Simulating spin systems on IANUS, an FPGA-based computer
• Aging rate of spin glasses from simulations matches experiments
• Matching microscopic and macroscopic responses in glasses
• Testing statics-dynamics equivalence at the spin-glass transition in three dimensions
• Dynamic Variational Study of Chaos: Spin Glasses in Three Dimensions
• Magnetic Field Dependence of Spin Glass Free Energy Barriers

Cited by in corpus (3)

• How to "measure" a structural relaxation time that is too long to be measured?
• Scaling law describes the spin-glass response in theory, experiments and simulations
• Stochastic fluctuations promote ordered pattern formation of cells in the Notch-Delta signaling pathway