English

The Gardner transition in finite dimensions

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2015-06-23 v2

Abstract

Recent works on hard spheres in the limit of infinite dimensions revealed that glass states, envisioned as meta-basins in configuration space, can break up in a multitude of separate basins at low enough temperature or high enough pressure, leading to the emergence of new kinds of soft-modes and unusual properties. In this paper we study by perturbative renormalisation group techniques the critical properties of this transition, which has been discovered in disordered mean-field models in the '80s. We find that the upper critical dimension dud_u above which mean-field results hold is strictly larger than six and apparently non-universal, i.e. system dependent. Below dud_u, we do not find any perturbative attractive fixed point (except for a tiny region of the 1RSB breaking parameter), thus showing that the transition in three dimensions either is governed by a non-perturbative fixed point unrelated to the Gaussian mean-field one or becomes first order or does not exist. We also discuss possible relationships with the behavior of spin glasses in a field.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1410.4523,
  title  = {The Gardner transition in finite dimensions},
  author = {Pierfrancesco Urbani and Giulio Biroli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.4523},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:26:25.233Z