Temperature chaos is present in off-equilibrium spin-glass dynamics

Experiments featuring non-equilibrium glassy dynamics under temperature changes still await interpretation. There is a widespread feeling that temperature chaos (an extreme sensitivity of the glass to temperature changes) should play a major role but, up to now, this phenomenon has been investigated solely under equilibrium conditions. In fact, the very existence of a chaotic effect in the non-equilibrium dynamics is yet to be established. In this article, we tackle this problem through a large simulation of the 3D Edwards-Anderson model, carried out on the Janus II supercomputer. We find a dynamic effect that closely parallels equilibrium temperature chaos. This dynamic temperature-chaos effect is spatially heterogeneous to a large degree and turns out to be controlled by the spin-glass coherence length ξ. Indeed, an emerging length-scale ξ* rules the crossover from weak (at ξ ≪ ξ*) to strong chaos (ξ ≫ ξ*). Extrapolations of ξ* to relevant experimental conditions are provided. While temperature chaos is an equilibrium notion that denotes the extreme fragility of the glassy phase with respect to temperature changes, it remains unclear whether it is present in non-equilibrium dynamics. Here the authors use the Janus II supercomputer to prove the existence of dynamic temperature chaos, a nonequilibrium phenomenon that closely mimics equilibrium temperature chaos.