Chaos and universality in two-dimensional Ising spin glasses

Understand

Recently extended precise numerical methods and droplet scaling arguments allow for a coherent picture of the glassy states of two-dimensional Ising spin glasses to be assembled.

• The length scale at which entropy becomes important and produces "chaos", the extreme sensitivity of the state to temperature, is found to depend on the type of randomness.
• For the $\pm J$ model this length scale dominates the low-temperature specific heat.
• Although there is a type of universality, some critical exponents do depend on the distribution of disorder.