Replica-symmetry breaking in dynamical glasses

Systems of globally coupled logistic maps (GCLM) can display complex collective behaviour characterized by the formation of synchronous clusters. In the dynamical clustering regime, such systems possess a large number of coexisting attractors and might be viewed as dynamical glasses. Glass properties of GCLM in the thermodynamical limit of large system sizes N are investigated. Replicas, representing orbits that start from various initial conditions, are introduced and distributions of their overlaps are numerically determined. We show that for fixed-field ensembles of initial conditions all attractors of the system become identical in the thermodynamical limit up to variations of order 1/, and thus replica symmetry is recovered for N→∞. In contrast to this, when fluctuating-field ensembles of initial conditions are chosen, replica symmetry remains broken in the thermodynamical limit. Received 9 July 2001