Random field Ising-like effective theory of the glass transition II: finite-dimensional models

As in the preceding paper Phys. Rev. B 98, 174205 (2018)10.1103/PhysRevB.98.174205, hereafter referred to as Paper I we aim at identifying the effective theory that describes the fluctuations of the local overlap with an equilibrium reference configuration close to a putative thermodynamic glass transition. We focus here on the case of finite-dimensional glass-forming systems, in particular supercooled liquids. The main difficulty for going beyond the mean-field treatment comes from the presence of diverging point-to-set spatial correlations. We introduce a variational low-temperature approximation scheme that allows us to account, at least in part, for the effect of these correlations. The outcome is an effective theory for the overlap fluctuations in terms of a random-field + random-bond Ising model with additional, power-law decaying, pair and multibody interactions generated by the point-to-set correlations. This theory is much more tractable than the original problem. We check the robustness of the approximation scheme by applying it to a fully connected model already studied in Paper I. We discuss the physical implications of this mapping for glass-forming liquids and the possibility it offers to determine the presence or not of a finite-temperature thermodynamic glass transition.