Convergence of the free energy for spherical spin glasses

Abstract

We prove that the free energy of any spherical mixed $p$-spin model converges as the dimension $N$ tends to infinity. While the convergence is a consequence of the Parisi formula, the proof we give is independent of the formula and uses the well-known Guerra-Toninelli interpolation method. The latter was invented for models with Ising spins to prove that the free energy is super-additive and therefore (normalized by $N$) converges. In the spherical case, however, the configuration space is not a product space and the interpolation cannot be applied directly. We first relate the free energy on the sphere of dimension $N+M$ to a free energy defined on the product of spheres in dimensions $N$ and $M$ to which we then apply the interpolation method. This yields an approximate super-additivity which is sufficient to prove the convergence.