Bond chaos in spin glasses revealed through thermal boundary conditions

Abstract: Spin glasses have competing interactions that lead to a rough energy landscape which is highly susceptible to small perturbations. These chaotic effects strongly affect numerical simulations and, as such, gaining a deeper understanding of chaos in spin glasses is of much importance. The use of thermal boundary conditions is an effective approach to study chaotic phenomena. Here, we generalize population annealing Monte Carlo, combined with thermal boundary conditions, to study bond chaos due to small perturbations in the spin-spin couplings of the three-dimensional Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass. We show that bond and temperature-induced chaos share the same scaling exponents and that bond chaos is stronger than temperature chaos.