Are There Incongruent Ground States in 2D Edwards-Anderson Spin Glasses?

We present a detailed proof of a previously announced result [1] supporting the absence of multiple (incongruent) ground state pairs for 2D Edwards-Anderson spin glasses (with zero external field and, e.g., Gaussian couplings): if two ground state pairs (chosen from metastates with, e.g., periodic boundary conditions) on Z2 are distinct, then the dual bonds where they differ form a single doubly-infinite, positive-density domain wall. It is an open problem to prove that such a situation cannot occur (or else to show — much less likely in our opinion — that it indeed does happen) in these models. Our proof involves an analysis of how (infinite-volume) ground states change as (finitely many) couplings vary, which leads us to a notion of zero-temperature excitation metastates, that may be of independent interest.