Monte Carlo simulations of the three-dimensional XY spin glass focusing on the chiral and the spin order

TL;DR

This study uses extensive Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the separate ordering temperatures of spin and chiral degrees of freedom in a 3D XY spin glass, revealing evidence of spin-chirality decoupling and distinct critical behaviors.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed finite-size scaling analysis of both spin and chiral orderings in the 3D XY spin glass, highlighting the spin-chirality decoupling and the nature of replica-symmetry breaking.

Findings

Evidence of separate spin and chiral ordering temperatures.

Chiral overlap distribution shows one-step replica-symmetry breaking.

Critical exponents differ from those of Ising spin glasses.

Abstract

The ordering of the three-dimensional isotropic {\it XY} spin glass with the nearest-neighbor random Gaussian coupling is studied by extensive Monte Carlo simulations. To investigate the ordering of the spin and the chirality, we compute several independent physical quantities including the glass order parameter, the Binder parameter, the correlation-length ratio, the overlap distribution and the non-self-averageness parameter, {\it etc}, for both the spin-glass (SG) and the chiral-glass (CG) degrees of freedom. Evidence of the spin-chirality decoupling, {\it i.e.}, the CG and the SG order occurring at two separated temperatures, $0<T_{SG}<T_{CG}$, is obtained from the glass order parameter, which is fully corroborated by the Binder parameter. By contrast, the CG correlation-length ratio yields a rather pathological and inconsistent result in the range of sizes we studied, which may originate from the finite-size effect associated with a significant short-length drop-off of the spatial CG correlations. Finite-size-scaling analysis yields the CG exponents $\nu_{CG}=1.36^{+0.15}_{-0.37}$ and $\eta_{CG}=0.26^{+0.29}_{-0.26}$, and the SG exponents $\nu_{SG}=1.22^{+0.26}_{-0.06}$ and $\eta_{SG}=-0.54^{+0.24}_{-0.52}$. The obtained exponents are close to those of the Heisenberg SG, but are largely different from those of the Ising SG. The chiral overlap distribution and the chiral Binder parameter exhibit the feature of a continuous one-step replica-symmetry breaking (1RSB), consistently with the previous reports. Such a 1RSB feature is again in common with that of the Heisenberg SG, but is different from the Ising one, which may be the cause of the difference in the CG critical properties from the Ising SG ones despite of a common $Z_2$ symmetry.