Critical properties of short-range Ising spin glasses on a Wheatstone-bridge hierarchical lattice.

An Ising spin-glass model with nearest-neighbor interactions, following a symmetric probability distribution, is investigated on a hierarchical lattice of the Wheatstone-bridge family characterized by a fractal dimension D≈3.58. The interaction distribution considered is a stretched exponential, which has been shown recently to be very close to the fixed-point coupling distribution, and such a model has been considered lately as a good approach for Ising spin glasses on a cubic lattice. An exact recursion procedure is implemented for calculating site magnetizations, mi=〈Si〉T, as well as correlations between pairs of nearest-neighbor spins, 〈SiSj〉T (〈〉T denote thermal averages), for a given set of interaction couplings on this lattice. From these local magnetizations and correlations, one can compute important physical quantities, such as the Edwards-Anderson order parameter, the internal energy, and the specific heat. Considering extrapolations to the thermodynamic limit for the order parameter, such as a finite-size scaling approach, it is possible to obtain directly the critical temperature and critical exponents. The transition between the spin-glass and paramagnetic phases is analyzed, and the associated critical exponents β and ν are estimated as β=0.82(5) and ν=2.50(4), which are in good agreement with the most recent results from extensive numerical simulations on a cubic lattice. Since these critical exponents were obtained from a fixed-point distribution, they are universal, i.e., valid for any coupling distribution considered.