Quadratic replica coupling in the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick mean field spin glass model

Francesco Guerra, Fabio L. Toninelli

Published 2002-01-08, updated 2002-03-05Version 2

We develop a simple method to study the high temperature, or high external field, behavior of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick mean field spin glass model. The basic idea is to couple two different replicas with a quadratic term, trying to push out the two replica overlap from its replica symmetric value. In the case of zero external field, our results reproduce the well known validity of the annealed approximation, up to the known critical value for the temperature. In the case of nontrivial external field, we prove the validity of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick replica symmetric solution up to a line, which falls short of the Almeida-Thouless line, associated to the onset of the spontaneous replica symmetry breaking, in the Parisi Ansatz. The main difference with the method, recently developed by Michel Talagrand, is that we employ a quadratic coupling, and not a linear one. The resulting flow equations, with respect to the parameters of the model, turn out to be much simpler, and more tractable. By applying the cavity method, we show also how to determine free energy and overlap fluctuations, in the region where replica symmetry has been shown to hold.