Strategy for solving difficulties in spin-glass simulations

A spin-glass transition has been investigated for a long time but we have not reached a conclusion yet due to difficulties in the simulation studies. They are slow dynamics, strong finite-size effects, and sample-to-sample dependencies. We found that a size of the spin-glass order reaches a lattice boundary within a very short Monte Carlo step. A competition between the spin-glass order and a boundary condition causes these difficulties. Once the boundary effect was removed, physical quantities exhibited quite normal behaviors. They became self-averaging in a limit of large replica numbers. These findings suggest that the nonequilibrium relaxation method is a good choice for solving the difficulties if a lattice size and a replica number are set sufficiently large. A dynamic scaling analysis on nonequilibrium relaxation functions gave a result that the spin-glass transition and the chiral-glass transition occurs at the same temperature in the Heisenberg model in three dimensions. The estimated critical exponent ν agrees with the experimental result.