Triviality of the ground-state metastate in long-range Ising spin glasses in one dimension

TL;DR

This paper rigorously proves that in a one-dimensional long-range Ising spin glass with decay parameter /2, the ground-state metastate is trivial and unique, indicating a single dominant ground state configuration.

Contribution

The authors establish the triviality and uniqueness of the ground-state metastate for /2 < , extending previous results and providing new rigorous proofs and heuristic support.

Findings

Ground-state metastate is trivial for /2 <  in the model.

Proof extends to all /2 <  using a convergence hypothesis.

Heuristic and rigorous bounds support broader validity of the hypothesis.

Abstract

We consider the one-dimensional model of a spin glass with independent Gaussian-distributed random interactions, that have mean zero and variance $1/|i-j|^{2\sigma}$, between the spins at sites $i$ and $j$ for all $i\neq j$. It is known that, for $\sigma>1$, there is no phase transition at any non-zero temperature in this model. We prove rigorously that, for $\sigma>3/2$, any Newman-Stein metastate for the ground states (i.e.\ the frequencies with which distinct ground states are observed in finite size samples in the limit of infinite size, for given disorder) is trivial and unique. In other words, for given disorder and asymptotically at large sizes, the same ground state, or its global spin flip, is obtained (almost) always. The proof consists of two parts: one is a theorem (based on one by Newman and Stein for short-range two-dimensional models), valid for all $\sigma>1$, that establishes triviality under a convergence hypothesis on something similar to the energies of domain walls, and the other (based on older results for the one-dimensional model) establishes that the hypothesis is true for $\sigma>3/2$. In addition, we derive heuristic scaling arguments and rigorous exponent inequalities which tend to support the validity of the hypothesis under broader conditions. The constructions of various metastates are extended to all values $\sigma>1/2$. Triviality of the metastate in bond-diluted power-law models for $\sigma>1$ is proved directly.