The Metastate Approach to Thermodynamic Chaos

In realistic disordered systems, such as the Edwards-Anderson (EA) spin glass, no order parameter, such as the Parisi overlap distribution, can be both translation-invariant and non-self-averaging. The standard mean-field picture of the EA spin glass phase can therefore not be valid in any dimension and at any temperature. Further analysis shows that, in general, when systems have many competing (pure) thermodynamic states, a single state which is a mixture of many of them (as in the standard mean-field picture) contains insufficient information to reveal the full thermodynamic structure. We propose a different approach, in which an appropriate thermodynamic description of such a system is instead based on a metastate, which is an ensemble of (possibly mixed) thermodynamic states. This approach, modelled on chaotic dynamical systems, is needed when chaotic size dependence (of finite volume correlations) is present. Here replicas arise in a natural way, when a metastate is specified by its (meta)correlations. The metastate approach explains, connects, and unifies such concepts as replica symmetry breaking, chaotic size dependence and replica non-independence. Furthermore, it replaces the older idea of non-self-averaging as dependence on the bulk couplings with the concept of dependence on the state within the metastate at