Free energy of the spherical mean field model (Q877450)

This paper considers the spherical \(p\)-spin mean field spin glass model, whose Hamiltonian is defined as \[ H_N(\sigma)=\frac{1}{\sqrt{N^{p-1}}}\sum_{1\leq i_1,\dots,i_p\leq N} J_{i_1,\ldots,i_p}\sigma_{i_1}\dots,\sigma_{i_p} \] with \(p\geq2\) an integer, \(\sigma_i\in \mathbb R\) with the spherical constraint \(\sum_{i=1}^N\sigma_i^2=N\) and \(J_{i_1,\dots,i_p}\) IID standard Gaussian random variables. The result which is proven here is that the \(N\to\infty\) limit of the free energy \[ F_N(\beta):=\frac1N\mathbb E\log \sum_\sigma e^{-\beta H_N(\sigma)} \] is given for every inverse temperature \(\beta\) by the analogue of the ``Parisi solution of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model'', as predicted by \textit{A. Crisanti} and \textit{H. J. Sommers} [Z. Phys. B 83, 341--354 (1992)]. The proof proceeds along the same lines as for the proof, by the same author, of the Parisi conjecture for the free energy of the SK model [\textit{M. Talagrand}, Ann. Math. (2) 163, 221--263 (2006; Zbl 1137.82010)]. One additional technical complication here is that even at infinite temperature the spins are not independent, due to the spherical constraint. Moreover, it is also proved (see Th. 1.2) that the infimum in the Parisi variational principle is attained at a unique functional order parameter \(x(\cdot)\). This is expected to be the case also for the SK model, but to my knowledge this has not been proven yet.