SPIN-GLASSES IN THE BETHE-PEIERLS-WEISS AND OTHER MEAN-FIELD APPROXIMATIONS

We obtain the thermodynamic properties of a system of Ising spins interacting with various random potentials in the Bethe-Peierls-Weiss (BPW) approximation. When the effective number of neighbors z approaches infinity, we show that all the magnetic properties arising from the BPW approximation, the mean random field (MRF) and the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) replica treatment are identical. Also, the internal energy in the BPW method is identical to that obtained by SK, while the MRF neglects correlations and thus gives a different internal energy. Introducing a plausible phenomenological constant of integration we obtain the microscopic free energy derived by Thouless, Anderson, and Palmer (TAP). Using this free energy, we show that the BPW method with a random distribution of fields reproduces all the results of SK including a negative entropy of -k(2π) at T=0, and that all probability distributions which do not go to zero at zero field give a negative entropy at T=0 For finite z, we obtain the phase diagram for the MRF method as a function of z and find that for z>8 the phase diagram is already very close to that of the z→ case. We also derive the thermodynamic properties for the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida system near the spin-glass transition temperature in the BPW method. We find that the method gives a discontinuous slope in the magnetic susceptibility χ and the specific heat CM at the spin-glass transition temperature Tg, however the maxima in χ and CM occur well below Tg. © 1979 The American Physical Society.