Temperature chaos may emerge many thermodynamic states in spin glasses

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale simulations to explore how temperature chaos in spin glasses leads to many thermodynamic states and pure states, revealing complex behavior at low temperatures.

Contribution

It demonstrates that temperature chaos can cause the emergence of numerous pure states in spin glasses, linking microscopic chaos to macroscopic state multiplicity.

Findings

Many thermodynamic states at finite temperature are compatible with ground states.

Temperature chaos causes sample-dependent pure state coexistence.

Disorder-averaged measures decrease monotonically with temperature.

Abstract

We present a large-scale simulation of the three-dimensional and mean-field spin glasses down to a very low but finite temperature. We extrapolate pertinent observables, e.g., the disorder-averaged central weight to zero temperature, finding that many thermodynamic states at a finite temperature and two ground states at zero temperature are fully compatible. While the disorder-averaged central weight monotonically decreases with decreasing temperature, this is far from true for individual samples. This motivates us to link this behaviour with the well-known temperature chaos. At an observing temperature, a sample may or may not have pure state coexistence depending on whether it is undergoing temperature chaos, which is a random process. Therefore, temperature chaos is likely responsible for the emergence of many pure states, providing a natural and intuitive explanation for the coexistence of expensive domain-wall excitations and many pure states at the disorder-averaged level.