Mean field theory of spin glasses

Francesco Zamponi

Published 2010-08-28, updated 2014-09-20Version 5

These lecture notes focus on the mean field theory of spin glasses, with particular emphasis on the presence of a very large number of metastable states in these systems. This phenomenon, and some of its physical consequences, will be discussed in details for fully-connected models and for models defined on random lattices. This will be done using the replica and cavity methods. These notes have been prepared for a course of the PhD program in Statistical Mechanics at SISSA, Trieste and at the University of Rome "Sapienza". Part of the material is reprinted from other lecture notes, and when this is done a reference is obviously provided to the original.