Chaos in spin glasses revealed through thermal boundary conditions

We study the fragility of spin glasses to small temperature perturbations numerically using population annealing Monte Carlo. We apply thermal boundary conditions to a three-dimensional Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass. In thermal boundary conditions all eight combinations of periodic versus antiperiodic boundary conditions in the three spatial directions are present, each appearing in the ensemble with its respective statistical weight determined by its free energy. We show that temperature chaos is revealed in the statistics of crossings in the free energy for different boundary conditions. By studying the energy difference between boundary conditions at free-energy crossings, we determine the domain-wall fractal dimension. Similarly, by studying the number of crossings, we determine the chaos exponent. Our results also show that computational hardness in spin glasses and the presence of chaos are closely related.

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