Real spin glasses relax slowly in the shade of hierarchical trees (Q833377)

The Parisi solution of the mean-field spin glass has been widely accepted and celebrated. Its marginal stability in 3d and its complexity however raised the question of its relevance to real spin glasses. This paper gives a short overview of the important experimental results which could be understood within the mean-field solution. The existence of a true phase transition and the particular behaviour of the susceptibility below the freezing temperature, predicted by the theory, are clearly confirmed by the experimental results. For the magnetization two types of response function can be obtained: linear response of the system in a pure state below the transition temperature and constant magnetization, which is the equilibrium response, thermally averaged over the whole phase space above the transition temperature. The existence of a true phase transition can be proved by measurement of critical behaviours. The behaviour of the complex order parameter and of the Fluctuation Dissipation ratio are in good agreement with results of spontaneous noise measurements. The relaxation function strongly depends on the time at which the field has been changed and on the time at which the magnetization is measured, and not only on the time difference as in equilibrated systems. The very particular ultrametric symmetry, the key feature of the theory, gives a simple description of the rejuvenation and memory effects observed in experiment. These effects are well described in terms of a hierarchical organization of the metastable states as a function of temperature. The hierarchy of metastable states can be transcribed in terms of a hierarchy of embedded correlation lengths. Finally, going a step beyond mean-field, the paper shortly discusses new analyses in terms of correlated domains characterized by their length scales, as well as new experiments on superspin glasses which compare well with recent theoretical simulations.