Affiliation: | a AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies 600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636, USA b Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA c Chemistry Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA |
Abstract: | The idea that some systems could have a thermodynamically large number of accessible ground states was presaged in the work of Pauling on ice (Pauling, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1945) [1]. With the advent of spin glasses, the methodology for describing ground states changed dramatically, and in particular it was realized that the observed slow dynamics were due to relaxation among a large number of nearly degenerate ground states. Now the accepted wisdom is that both “frustration”, as well as structural disorder, is responsible for spin glass behavior. However, well before spin-glasses were identified as a distinct class of systems, it had been appreciated that even for structurally periodic systems, bond frustration could lead to a thermodynamically large number of states. There is now a well-defined class of magnets which display effects of macroscopic ground state degeneracy. This class of geometrically frustrated magnets presents some new paradigms with which to view condensed matter systems – marginal underconstraint and downward shift of spectral weight. We discuss possible realizations of these phenomena in both in spin ice and also outside the context of local-moment magnetism. |