Low energy excitations of vector spin glasses

Abstract

The work of this thesis concerns the problem of linear low energy excitations of vector spin glass models. An analytical and numerical study is carried out, considering a fully connected random-field Heisenberg model at zero temperature, a fully-connected vector p-spin glass model and a sparse random-field Heisenberg model. We test these models against the low temperature behavior of finite dimensional glassy systems, in particular we show that they posses phases where the density of states is gapless with quasi-localised modes. In the case of the sparse model, we show that the density of states follows a quartic law at low frequency, consistently with several recent measures of this quantity that can be found in the literature of computer glasses. In all the three models, the spin glass transition is characterised in terms of the behavior of the softest excitations. We found that in the fully connected models the zero temperature spin glass transition in a field is a delocalisation transition of the softest modes. In the sparse case, a weaker form of delocalisation appears at the transition. These results broaden our understanding of the zero temperature critical point, by showing how spin glass ordering affects the way the system responds to small magnetic perturbations.