Exploring Replica Symmetry Breaking and Topological Collapse in Spin Glasses with Quantum Annealing
Abstract
Replica symmetry breaking (RSB) underlies the complex organization of disordered systems, yet quantitative validation beyond spins has remained computationally challenging. We use quantum annealing to access ground states of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model up to spins, enabling the most extensive test of Parisi's Nobel Prize-winning RSB solution to date. Five independent observables confirm RSB predictions: ground-state energies converge to Parisi's value with characteristic corrections, energy fluctuations scale as (), the chaos exponent () confirms mean-field universality, the overlap distribution exhibits hierarchical structure (), and the complexity remains invariant under 36\% network dilution. Beyond a critical threshold , the hierarchy collapses discontinuously through a cooperative avalanche that converts the entire system to vacancies within a narrow parameter window . These findings establish quantum computation as a tool for probing emergent many-body phenomena and uncover the topological foundations of complexity in disordered systems, with implications for neural networks, optimization, and materials science.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.06403,
title = {Exploring Replica Symmetry Breaking and Topological Collapse in Spin Glasses with Quantum Annealing},
author = {Kumar Ghosh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.06403},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
5 pages, 5 figures