Energy landscapes of small SK spin glasses

Abstract

We study the $\pm J$ SK model for small $N$'s up to $N=9$. We sort the $2^{N(N-1)/2}$ possible realizations of the coupling matrix into equivalence classes according to the gauge symmetry and permutation symmetry and determine the energy spectra for each of these classes. We also study the energy landscape in these small systems and find that the elements of the hierarchic organization of ground states %and higher energy local minima start to appear in some samples already for $N$'s as small as 6.