Universal fragility of spin-glass ground-states under single bond changes

Author:

Mutian Shen, Gerardo Ortiz, Yang-Yu Liu, Martin Weigel, Zohar Nussinov

Keyword:

Condensed Matter, Disordered Systems and Neural Networks, Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn), Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)

journal:

date:

2023-05-16 16:00:00

Abstract

We consider the effect of perturbing a single bond on ground-states of nearest-neighbor Ising spin-glasses, with a Gaussian distribution of the coupling constants, across various two and three-dimensional lattices and regular random graphs. Our results reveal that the ground-states are strikingly susceptible to such changes. Altering the strength of only a single bond beyond a critical threshold value leads to a new ground-state that differs from the original one by a droplet of flipped spins whose boundary and volume diverge with the system size -- an effect that is reminiscent of the more familiar phenomenon of disorder chaos. These elementary fractal-boundary zero-energy droplets and their composites feature robust characteristics and provide the lowest-energy macroscopic spin-glass excitations. Remarkably, within numerical accuracy, the size of such droplets conforms to a nearly universal power-law distribution with exponents dependent on the spatial dimension of the system. Furthermore, the critical coupling strengths adhere to a stretched Gaussian distribution that is predominantly determined by the local coordination number.

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