Metastable minima of the Heisenberg spin glass in a random magnetic field

Abstract

We have studied zero-temperature metastable minima in classical m-vector component spin glasses in the presence of m-component random fields for two models, the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model and the Viana-Bray (VB) model. For the SK model we have calculated analytically its complexity (the log of the number of minima) for both the annealed case where one averages the number of minima before taking the log and the quenched case where one averages the complexity itself, both for fields above and below the de Almeida-Thouless (AT) field, which is finite for m>2. We have done numerical quenches starting from a random initial state (infinite temperature state) by putting spins parallel to their local fields until there is no further decrease of the energy and found that in zero field it always produces minima that have zero overlap with each other. For the m=2 and m=3 cases in the SK model the final energy reached in the quench is very close to the energy E_{c} at which the overlap of the states would acquire replica symmetry-breaking features. These minima have marginal stability and will have long-range correlations between them. In the SK limit we have analytically studied the density of states ρ(λ) of the Hessian matrix in the annealed approximation. Despite the fact that in the presence of a random field there are no continuous symmetries, the spectrum extends down to zero with the usual sqrt[λ] form for the density of states for fields below the AT field. However, when the random field is larger than the AT field, there is a gap in the spectrum, which closes up as the AT field is approached. The VB model behaves differently and seems rather similar to studies of the three-dimensional Heisenberg spin glass in a random vector field.