Organization and energy properties of metastable states for the random-field Ising model

Random-field Ising model (RFIM) systems are characterized by a large number of metastable states corresponding to local minima of the system energy with respect to single spin flip. We classified the minima in a hierarchical way based on the possibility of a given state to escape from a basin of mutually reachable states. We investigate the energy properties of the metastable states in relation to the basin they belong to: states of particularly high energy, obtained by fast-quenching randomly initial spin configurations, tend to have access to a complex structure of correlated basins, opposite to what is found for low-energy states. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between the properties of the basin oriented graph and the energy of the corresponding states.