Evidence that the de Almeida-Thouless transition disappears below six dimensions.

Abstract

One of the key predictions of Parisi's broken replica symmetry theory of spin glasses is the existence of a phase transition in an applied field to a state with broken replica symmetry. This transition takes place at the de Almeida-Thouless (AT) line in the h-T plane. We have studied this line in the power-law diluted Heisenberg spin glass in which the probability that two spins separated by a distance r interact with each other falls as 1/r^{2σ}. In the presence of a random vector field of variance h_{r}^{2} the phase transition is in the universality class of the Ising spin glass in a field. Tuning σ is equivalent to changing the dimension d of the short-range system, with the relation being d=2/(2σ-1) for σ<2/3. We have found by numerical simulations that h_{AT}^{2}∼(2/3-σ) implying that the AT line does not exist below six dimensions and that the Parisi scheme is not appropriate for spin glasses in three dimensions.