Criticality and Energy Landscapes in Spin Glasses

Abstract

Despite the extreme simplicity in their definition, spin glasses disclose a wide variety of non-trivial behaviors that are not yet fully understood. In this thesis we try to shed light on some of them, focusing on one hand on the search of phase transitions under perturbations of the Hamiltonian, and on the other hand on the zero-temperature properties and responses to external stimuli. After introducing spin glasses through a historiographical review, and useful concepts on phase transitions and numerics, the results of two massive Monte Carlo campaigns on three-dimensional systems are shown. In the first one the de Almeida-Thouless transition is studied, and a new finite-size scaling ansatz is proposed, that accelerates the convergence to the thermodynamic limit. In the second one the phase diagram of the Heisenberg spin glass with random exchange anisotropy is reconstructed. In the following part of the manuscript, surprising features of zero-temperature statics and dynamics of several spin glass models are found. Among them, correlations between soft spins that arise spontaneously during avalanches, and the discovery of localized states that involve the presence of two-level systems.