Ordering of the Heisenberg spin glass in four dimensions

Abstract

Ordering of the Heisenberg spin glass in four dimensions (4D) with the nearest-neighbor Gaussian coupling is investigated by equilibrium Monte Carlo simulations, with particular attention to its spin and chiral orderings. It is found that the spin and the chirality order simultaneously with a common correlation-length exponent ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\mathrm{CG}}={\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\mathrm{SG}}\ensuremath{\simeq}1.0$ i.e., the absence of the spin-chirality decoupling in 4D. Yet, the spin-glass ordered state exhibits a nontrivial phase-space structure associated with a continuous one-step-like replica-symmetry breaking, different in nature from that of the Ising spin glass or of the mean-field spin glass. Comparison is made with the ordering of the Heisenberg spin glass in 3D, and with that of the 1D Heisenberg spin glass with a long-range power-law interaction. It is argued that 4D might be close to the marginal dimension separating the spin-chirality decoupling/coupling regimes.