Metastable states in short-ranged p-spin glasses

The mean number < N > of metastable states in spin glass models with short-ranged p-spin interactions is estimated analytically using a variational method introduced by Tanaka and Edwards (1980 J. Phys. F: Met. Phys. 10 2769) for very large coordination numbers. For lattices with small connectivities, numerical simulations do not show any significant dependence on the relative positions of the interacting spins on the lattice, indicating thus that these systems can be described by a few macroscopic parameters. As an extremely anisotropic model we consider the low-autocorrelated binary spin model and we show through numerical simulations that its landscape has an exceptionally large number of local optima.