Dynamics of ghost domains in spin-glasses

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spin-glasses recover their order after perturbations, revealing slow healing dynamics and confirming these findings through simulations of the Edwards-Anderson model.

Contribution

It provides revised scaling arguments for ghost domain healing and demonstrates their validity via Monte Carlo simulations.

Findings

Order parameter recovers slowly within ghost domains.

Memory auto-correlation function exhibits a peak at the age of ghost domains.

Simulation results confirm the slow healing dynamics predicted by the theory.

Abstract

We revisit the problem of how spin-glasses ``heal'' after being exposed to tortuous perturbations by the temperature/bond chaos effects in temperature/bond cycling protocols. Revised scaling arguments suggest the amplitude of the order parameter within ghost domains recovers very slowly as compared with the rate it is reduced by the strong perturbations. The parallel evolution of the order parameter and the size of the ghost domains can be examined in simulations and experiments by measurements of a memory auto-correlation function which exhibits a ``memory peak'' at the time scale of the age imprinted in the ghost domains. These expectations are confirmed by Monte Calro simulations of an Edwards-Anderson Ising spin-glass model.