# 1 𝑞^(𝐿) in the MKA (lines without points) and from simulations of the 3⁢𝑑 EA spin glass.

Comment on “Evidence for the Droplet/Scaling Picture of Spin Glasses”

In a recent letter Moore et al.  claim to exhibit evidence for a non-mean-field behavior of the $`3d`$ Ising spin glass. We show here that their claim is insubstantial, and by analyzing in detail the behavior of the Migdal-Kadanoff approximation (MKA) as compared to the behavior of the Edwards-Anderson (EA) spin glass we find further evidence of a mean-field like behavior of the $`3d`$ spin glass.

The main point of  does not concern the validity of the MKA in describing spin glasses, since it is well known, after the work of , that already at the mean field level the MKA describes a trivial droplet structure, completely missing the structure of the phase space of the model in any dimension.

Reference  shows instead that the probability distribution of the order parameter $`P_{MK}(q)`$ computed in the MKA at $`T=0.7`$, close to the temperature where most of the numerical simulations have been run , has a spurious small $`q`$ “plateau”, very similar to the non-trivial $`P(q)`$ one finds numerically for the EA model. In these conditions, for values of the lattice size comparable to the ones used in numerical simulations, $`L16`$, the small $`q`$ region of $`P_{MK}(q)`$ does not seem to depend on $`L`$, even if one knows that eventually, for very large values of $`L`$, it will have to become trivial. The authors of  explain this coincidence as a hint of the fact that asymptotically the EA model will also behave as a droplet model.

Here we show that this similarity in the behavior of the MKA and the true EA $`3d`$ spin glass does not concern observables that are crucial for determining replica symmetry breaking (RSB). We look at the link overlap (on a system of linear size $`L`$ and volume $`V=L^3`$) $`q^{(L)}1/(3V)^{}\sigma _i\sigma _{i+\widehat{\mu }}\tau _i\tau _{i+\widehat{\mu }}`$, where the sum runs over first-neighbor site pairs. $`q^{(L)}`$ is more sensitive than the usual overlap $`q`$ to the difference between a droplet and a mean field like behavior. The link overlap is, as discussed for example in , of crucial importance, since a non-trivial $`P(q)`$ could be simply due to the presence of interfaces, while a non-trivial $`P(q^{(L)})`$ is a non-ambiguous signature of RSB.

We show that one can see a clear difference, already at $`T=0.7`$ on medium-size lattices, among the MKA and the EA model. So, not only our observation makes the point of  obsolete, but it also shows that simulations on reasonable-sized lattices are useful, when studying either disordered systems or normal statistical mechanical models (from the point of view of the advocates of  in the case of disordered systems only simulations on systems of huge size could make the true nature of the system manifest).

We have analyzed the MKA of the $`3d`$ spin glass (averaging over $`1000`$ disorder samples), and the $`3d`$ EA model by numerical simulations (using a tempering algorithm  and an annealing scheme, checking convergence and averaging over $`64`$ or more samples). In all cases we have considered binary couplings and a Hamiltonian $`H_ϵ[\sigma ,\tau ]=H_0[\sigma ]+H_0[\tau ]ϵ^{}\sigma _i\sigma _{i+\widehat{\mu }}\tau _i\tau _{i+\widehat{\mu }}`$, where $`H_0`$ is the usual EA $`3d`$ Hamiltonian.

In fig. (1) we show our results for $`q^{(L)}(ϵ)`$ versus $`ϵ^{\frac{1}{2}}`$. The MKA gives a smooth behavior: for small $`ϵ`$, $`q^{(L)}(ϵ)`$ behaves like $`ϵ^\lambda `$, with $`\lambda 1`$. Finite size effects look very small for these sizes (from $`4`$ to $`16`$). The EA model behaves in a completely different way. Here finite size effects are large, and the behavior for small $`ϵ`$ becomes more singular for larger sizes. The $`L=4`$ lattice is reminiscent of the MKA behavior, but already at $`L=8`$ the difference is clear. From our data we are not able to definitely establish the existence of a discontinuity, but the numerical evidence is strongly suggestive of that. The data are suggestive of the building up of a discontinuity as $`L\mathrm{}`$, i.e. $`q=q_++A_+ϵ^\lambda `$ for $`ϵ>0`$ and $`q=q_{}+A_{}|ϵ|^\lambda `$ for $`ϵ<0`$, with $`q_+q_{}`$ and an exponent $`\lambda `$ close to $`\frac{1}{2}`$: a continuous behavior (i.e. $`q_+=q_{}`$) cannot be excluded from these data, but in this case we find an upper limit $`\lambda <0.25`$, totally different from the behavior of MKA, $`\lambda 1`$. This is what is needed to show that when looking at observables that are very sensitive to RSB the difference among the trivial behavior of the MKA and true spin glasses is already clear at $`T0.6T_c`$ on lattices of size $`L16`$, as opposed to the claims of .

E. Marinari, G. Parisi, J. J. Ruiz-Lorenzo and F. Zuliani