Investigation of the validity of the "slow-cooling" iterative mean-field method for the study of ground-state properties of spin-glasses

Abstract

Following a recent method for the study of the free-energy surface of spin-glasses, where numerical solutions of the mean-field equations of finite systems are obtained, we study the magnetization of nearest-neighbor Ising spin-glasses at zero temperature as a function of magnetic field. Comparison with Monte Carlo simulations performed for the same samples shows that the mean-field method does not yield quantitatively reliable predictions; it finds metastable minima of the free-energy surface rather than the true ground states.