Evidence that the AT transition disappears below six dimensions

Abstract

One of the key predictions of Parisi's broken replica symmetry theory of spin glasses is the existence of a phase transition in an applied field to a state with broken replica symmetry. This transition takes place at the de Almeida-Thouless (AT) line in the $h-T$ plane. We have studied this line in the power-law diluted Heisenberg spin glass in which the probability that two spins separated by a distance $r$ interact with each other falls as $1/r^{2\sigma}$. In the presence of a random vector-field of variance $h_r^2$ the phase transition is in the universality class of the Ising spin glass in a field. Tuning $\sigma$ is equivalent to changing the dimension $d$ of the short-range system, with the relation being $d =2/(2\sigma -1)$ for $\sigma < 2/3$. We have found by numerical simulations that $h_{\text{AT}}^2 \sim (2/3 -\sigma)$ implying that the AT line does not exist below $6$ dimensions and that the Parisi scheme is not appropriate for spin glasses in three dimensions.