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.
Read more about Spin Glass: Magnetic Behavior, Edwards–Anderson Model, The Model of Sherrington and Kirkpatrick, Infinite-range Model, Non-ergodic Behavior and Applications
Famous quotes containing the words spin and/or glass:
“Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.”
—David Lehman (b. 1948)
“Thales claimed that everything was water. He also put wine into water to sterilize it. Did he really believe he was putting water into water to sterilize it? Parmenides, like most Greeks, knew that wine was not water. But while lifting a glass of wine to his lips, he denied that motion was possible. Did he really believe that the glass was not moving when he lifted it?”
—Avrum Stroll (b. 1921)