Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme

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SYEL: Symposium Energy Landscapes: Statistical Physics of (Spin-)Glasses, Biomolecules, Clusters and Optimization Problems

SYEL 1: Energy Landscapes: Statistical Physics of (Spin-)Glasses, Biomolecules, Clusters and Optimization Problems (SYEL)

SYEL 1.5: Invited Talk

Monday, March 22, 2010, 12:00–12:30, H1

Phase transitions in spin glasses — •Peter Young — Physics Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA

This talk will describe recent progress in understanding phase transitions in spin glasses. Whereas the Ising spin glass in zero field is quite well understood, the nature of the transition in the Heisenberg spin glass is much less clear. Another topic of great current interest is whether there is a phase transition in a magnetic field (the de Almeida-Thouless line) for an Ising spin glass. The AT line is argued to exist in the "replica symmetry breaking" (RSB) scenario for the nature of the spin glass state, but not in the "droplet theory". I will discuss results of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations which investigate these questions.