Frustration and ground-state degeneracy in spin glasses

The problem of an Ising model with random nearest-neighbor interactions is reformulated to make manifest Toulouse's recent suggestion that a broken "lattice gauge symmetry" is responsible for the unusual properties of spin glasses. Exact upper and lower bounds on the ground-state energy for models in which the interactions are of constant magnitude but fluctuating sign are obtained, and used to place restrictions on possible geometries of the unsatisfied interactions which must be present in the ground state. Proposed analogies between the ferromagnet-spin-glass phase boundary at zero temperature and a percolation threshold for the "strings" of unsatisfied bonds are reviewed in the light of this analysis. Monte Carlo simulations show that the upper bound resulting from a "one-dimensional approximation" to the spin-glass ground-state energy is reasonably close to the actual result. The transition between spin glass and ferromagnet at 0 K appears to be weakly first order in these models. The entropy of the ground state is obtained from the temperature dependence of the internal energy, and compared with the density of free spins at very low temperatures. For a two-dimensional spin glass in which half the bonds are antiferromagnetic, S(0)0.099kB; for the analogous three-dimensional spin glass the result is S(0)0.062kB. Monte Carlo kinetic simulations are reported which demonstrate the existence and stability of a field-cooled moment in the spin-glass ground state.