By quenched-randomly mixing local units of different spatial dimensionalities, we have studied Ising spin-glass systems on hierarchical lattices continuously in dimensionalities 1 ≤ d ≤ 3. The global phase diagram in temperature, antiferromagnetic bond concentration, and spatial dimensionality is calculated. We find that, as dimension is lowered, the spin-glass phase disappears to zero temperature at the lower-critical dimension dc = 2.431. Our system being a physically realizable system, this sets an upper limit to the lower-critical dimension in general for the Ising spin-glass phase. As dimension is lowered towards dc, the spin-glass critical temperature continuously goes to zero, but the spin-glass chaos fully sustains to the brink of the disappearance of the spin-glass phase. The Lyapunov exponent, measuring the strength of chaos, is thus largely unaffected by the approach to dc and shows a discontinuity to zero at dc.

Discrete-spin systems with maximally random nearest-neighbor interactions that can be symmetric or asymmetric, ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic, including off-diagonal disorder, are studied, for the number of states q = 3,4 in d dimensions. We use renormalization-group theory that is exact for hierarchical lattices and approximate (Migdal-Kadanoff) for hypercubic lattices. For all d > 1 and all noninfinite temperatures, the system eventually renormalizes to a random single state, thus signaling q × q degenerate ordering. Note that this is the maximally degenerate ordering. For high-temperature initial conditions, the system crosses over to this highly degenerate ordering only after spending many renormalization-group iterations near the disordered (infinite-temperature) fixed point. Thus, a temperature range of short-range disorder in the presence of long-range order is identified, as previously seen in underfrustrated Ising spin-glass systems. The entropy is calculated for all temperatures, behaves similarly for ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions, and shows a derivative maximum at the short-range disordering temperature. With a sharp immediate contrast of infinitesimally higher dimension 1 + , the system is as expected disordered at all temperatures for d = 1.