Structural Properties of the Disordered Spherical and other Mean Field Spin Models

Abstract

We extend the approach of Aizenman, Sims and Starr for the SK-type models to their spherical versions. Such an extension has already been performed for diluted spin glasses. The factorization property of the optimal structures found by Guerra for the SK model, which holds for diluted models as well, is verified also in the case of spherical systems, with the due modifications. Hence we show that there are some common structural features in various mean field spin models. These similarities seem to be quite paradigmatic, and we summarize the various techniques typically used to prove the structural analogies and to tackle the computation of the free energy per spin in the thermodynamic limit.