Replica Cluster Variational Method

We present a general formalism to make the Replica-Symmetric and Replica-Symmetry-Breaking ansatz in the context of Kikuchi's Cluster Variational Method (CVM). Using replicas and the message-passing formulation of CVM we obtain a variational expression of the replicated free energy of a system with quenched disorder, both averaged and on a single sample, and make the hierarchical ansatz using functionals of functions of fields to represent the messages. We obtain a set of integral equations for the message functionals. The main difference with the Bethe case is that the functionals appear in the equations in implicit form and are not positive definite, thus standard iterative population dynamic algorithms cannot be used to determine them. In the simplest cases the solution could be obtained iteratively using Fourier transforms. We begin to study the method considering the plaquette approximation to the averaged free energy of the Edwards-Anderson model in the paramagnetic Replica-Symmetric phase. In two dimensions we find that the spurious spin-glass phase transition of the Bethe approximation disappears and the paramagnetic phase is stable down to zero temperature on the square lattice for different random interactions. The quantitative estimates of the free energy and of various other quantities improve those of the Bethe approximation. The plaquette approximation fails to predict a second-order spin-glass phase transition on the cubic 3D lattice but yields good results in dimension four and higher. We provide the physical interpretation of the beliefs in the replica-symmetric phase as disorder distributions of the local Hamiltonian. The messages instead do not admit such an interpretation and indeed they cannot be represented as populations in the spin-glass phase at variance with the Bethe approximation. The approach can be used in principle to study the phase diagram of a wide range of disordered systems and it is also possible that it can be used to get quantitative predictions on single samples. These further developments present however great technical challenges.