Potential energy landscape of finite-size mean-field models for glasses

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza” and INFM Unità di Roma I - P.le Aldo Moro 2, I-00185 Roma, Italy
² Physics Department, Faculty of Physics, University of Barcelona Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, Spain

Corresponding authors: andrea.crisanti@phys.uniroma1.it ritort@ffn.ub.es

Received: 14 February 2000
Accepted: 18 May 2000

Abstract

We analyze the properties of the energy landscape of finite-size fully connected spin-glass models with a discontinuous transition. In the thermodynamic limit the equilibrium properties in the high-temperature phase are described by the schematic mode coupling theory of super-cooled liquids. We show that finite-size fully connected spin-glass models do exhibit properties typical of Lennard-Jones systems when both are near the critical glass transition, where thermodynamics is ruled by energy minima distribution. Our study opens the way to consider activated processes in real glasses through finite-size corrections (i.e. calculations beyond the saddle-point approximation) in mean-field spin-glass models.