Schedule Oct 12, 2012
A Model for a Glassy Phase in a Frustrated Magnet Without Disorder
Olivier Cépas (Institut Néel)

Certain geometrically frustrated magnets (kagome, pyrochore) freeze below a temperature Tg. They have static order with locally frozen spins but no long-range magnetic order. They seem to differ from standard spin-glasses since the chemical disorder may be weak.

I will present a simple spin model which has a glassy phase in absence of quenched disorder. The phase has a frozen moment and slow dynamics below a temperature Tg and, moreover, the phase space breaks into an exponential number of metastable states. I will compare with experimental results in kagome compounds and give some predictions, in particular regarding the heterogeneous nature of the dynamics.

Ref: O. Cépas and B. Canals, Phys. Rev. B 86, 024434 (2012).

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