Spin glasses and percolation

Abstract

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The description of thermodynamic phase transitions in terms of percolation transitions of suitably defined clusters has a long tradition and boasts a number of important successes, the most prominent ones being in ferromagnetic lattice models. Spin glasses and other frustrated systems are not among them as the clusters of aligned spins usually considered in this context start to percolate in the disordered phase and hence fail to indicate the onset of ordering. In this mini-review we provide an overview of the state of the art in this field, including recent advances, and outline the main open questions in the area.

Keywords

• spin glasses
• percolation
• lattice models
• Monte Carlo simulations
• phase transitions
• quenched disorder