Universal critical behavior of the 2d Ising spin glass

TL;DR

This paper investigates the universal critical behavior of 2D Ising spin glasses using finite size scaling, confirming universality across different coupling distributions and overcoming previous analysis obstacles.

Contribution

It introduces a temperature-independent scaling approach to accurately estimate critical exponents and confirms universality between binary and Gaussian couplings.

Findings

Universality confirmed between binary and Gaussian couplings

Reliable estimates of anomalous dimension and critical exponent obtained

Temperature dependence of scaling fields identified as key obstacle

Abstract

We use finite size scaling to study Ising spin glasses in two spatial dimensions. The issue of universality is addressed by comparing discrete and continuous probability distributions for the quenched random couplings. The sophisticated temperature dependency of the scaling fields is identified as the major obstacle that has impeded a complete analysis. Once temperature is relinquished in favor of the correlation length as the basic variable, we obtain a reliable estimation of the anomalous dimension and of the thermal critical exponent. Universality among binary and Gaussian couplings is confirmed to a high numerical accuracy.