Separation of time and length scales in spin glasses: Temperature as a microscope

We summarize the different puzzles raised by aging experiments of spin glasses and their various interpretations. We try to reconcile the “real space,” dropletlike pictures with the hierarchical pictures that have been proposed in the past. The basic ingredient is a strong separation of the time scales that govern the dynamics of the system on different length scales. Changing the temperature abruptly changes the length scale at which the system is observed, thereby allowing rejuvenation (that concerns short length scales) and memory (stored in long length scales) to coexist. We show that previous experiments can be reanalyzed in terms of vanishing free-energy barriers at the spin-glass transition, an important ingredient to obtain a fast separation of time scales. We propose to distinguish between “fixed landscape rejuvenation,” which is already present in simple two (or multi) level systems, from the “strong” chaos effect on scales larger than the “overlap length” conjectured in the context of the droplet model. We argue that most experiments can be accounted for without invoking the existence of an overlap length. Experiments are presented to test some recent predictions of the strong chaos scenario, with negative results.