Spin Glass

A spin glass is a disordered magnet with frustrated interactions, augmented by stochastic positions of the spins, where conflicting interactions, namely both ferromagnetic and also antiferromagnetic bonds, are randomly distributed with comparable frequency. The term "glass" in the bold-printed title name refers to the fact that its magnetic disorder brings to mind the positional disorder of a conventional, chemical glass, e.g., a window glass. Whereas, however, these are typically nonmagnetic, here the "glass property" refers essentially to the magnetic properties only, i.e. to the spin structure only.

Spin glasses display many metastable structures leading to a plenitude of time scales which are difficult to explore experimentally or in simulations.