THE CAVITY APPROACH FOR METASTABLE GLASSY STATES NEAR RANDOM FIRST-ORDER PHASE-TRANSITIONS

It is shown that the cavity method developed to describe equilibrium s tates in the mean-field Ising spin glass model can be generalized to d escribe metastable states in the mean-field Potts glass. The crucial i nput is the existence of an extensive number of statistically similar but incongruent metastable states with a weighted Gaussian free energy distribution. It is argued that the inherent quenched randomness in t he Potts glass Hamiltonian is not important for most of the arguments and that this approach provides insight into recent work on the struct ural glass problem.