Collective excitations and marginal stability of quantum Ising spin glasses

Abstract

We solve the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model in a transverse field \Gamma deep in its quantum glass phase at zero temperature. We show that the glass phase is critical everywhere, exhibiting collective excitations with a gapless Ohmic spectral function. Using an effective potential approach, we interpret the latter as being due to disordered spin waves which behave as weakly coupled, underdamped harmonic oscillators. In the limit of small transverse field the low frequency tail of the spectrum tends to a universal, \Gamma-independent limit.