New analysis of the free energy cost of interfaces in spin glasses

In this work we want to enhance the calculation performed by Franz, Parisi and Virasoro (FPV) (Franz et al 1992 J. Physique I 2 1869-80; Franz et al 1994 J. Physique 1 4 1657-67) to estimate the free energy cost of interfaces in spin glasses and evaluate the lower critical dimension at which replica symmetry is restored. In particular we evaluate the free energy cost for a general class of effective Hamiltonians showing full replica symmetry breaking, and study the dependence of this cost on the order parameter and on the temperature. We confirm the findings of the WV papers for the scaling of the free energy, recovering a value for the lower critical dimension of D-lc = 2.5. In addition to their results we find a non-trivial dependence of the free energy density cost on the order parameter and the temperature. Apart from the case of a restricted class of effective Hamiltonians this dependence cannot be expressed in terms of functions with a clear physical interpretation, as is the case in hierarchical models (Franz et al 2009 J. Stat. Mech. P02002). In addition we connect the results on the lower critical dimension with recent simulations (Maiorano and Parisi 2018 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 115 5129-34).