A Note on the Guerra and Talagrand Theorems for Mean Field Spin Glasses: The Simple Case of Spherical Models

The aim of this paper is to discuss the main ideas of the Talagrand proof of the Parisi Ansatz for the free-energy of Mean Field Spin Glasses with a physicist's approach. We consider the case of the spherical p-spin model, which has the following advantages: (1) the Parisi Ansatz takes the simple “one step replica symmetry breaking form,” (2) the replica free-energy as a function of the order parameters is simple enough to allow for numerical maximization with arbitrary precision. We present the essential ideas of the proof, we stress its connections with the theory of effective potentials for glassy systems, and we reduce the technically more difficult part of the Talagrand's analysis to an explicit evaluation of the solution of a variational problem.