Large deviations of glassy effective potentials

Abstract

Abstract The theory of glassy fluctuations can be formulated in terms of disordered effective potentials. While the properties of the average potentials are well understood, the study of the fluctuations has been so far quite limited. Close to the MCT transition, fluctuations induced by the dynamical heterogeneities in supercooled liquids can be described by a cubic field theory in presence of a random field term. In this paper, we set up the general problem of the large deviations going beyond the assumption of the vicinity to T MCT and analyze it in the paradigmatic case of spherical (p-spin) glass models. This tool can be applied to study the probability of the observation of dynamic trajectories with memory of the initial condition in regimes where, typically, the correlation C(t, 0) decays to zero at long times, at finite T and at T = 0.