Tensionless structure of glassy phase

Abstract

We study a class of homogeneous finite-dimensional Ising models which were recently shown to exhibit glassy properties. Monte Carlo simulations of a particular three-dimensional model in this class show that the glassy phase obtained under slow cooling is dominated by large scale excitations whose energy $E_l$ scales with their size $l$ as $E_l\sim l^{\Theta}$ with $\Theta\sim 1.33(5)$. Simulations suggest that in another model of this class, namely the four-spin model, energy is concentrated mainly in linear defects making also in this case domain walls tensionless. Two-dimensinal variants of these models are trivial and energy of excitations scales with the exponent $\Theta=1.05(5)$.