Date of Award

5-8-2024

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Author's Department

Physics

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Type

Dissertation

Abstract

In the past decades, enormous effort has been devoted to the study of low-temperature spin glasses. The undertaken approaches were primarily of two different types. On one hand, various theoretical pictures aimed to capture the essence and rationalize the quintessential physical features of spin glass systems. On the other hand, much work was spent on the design of various algorithms in the hope of finding efficient numerical methods for calculating the ground state or sampling excited states. The latter endeavor has ramifications in fields far beyond those of spin glasses (such as in optimization problems, biology, and the study of complexity in many other systems). Thus far, there still exists severe disagreement among the various leading contending theoretical pictures for the understanding of the low-temperature physics of spin glasses. There are, furthermore, no efficient algorithms that allow extended ground state calculations of large systems. We believe that there is an inextricable connection between the low-temperature structure of spin glasses and the optimization algorithms for finding the ground state. I will aim to shed light on and outline various aspects of such a connection. In particular, I will review our work in trying to demonstrate how this connection affords insight into the behavior of spin glasses and optimization algorithms that probe their low-energy states.

Language

English (en)

Chair and Committee

Zohar Nussinov

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