Unconventional Spin-Glass Behaviors Induced by Geometrical Frustration and Spin-Lattice Coupling(Current Topics)

Abstract

Spin glass, in which spins are frozen in random directions, appears as a result of randomness in magnetic interactions. Recently, it has been pointed out that a certain group of magnets exhibit spin-glass behaviors that are hard to explain by the conventional spin-glass theory. Focusing on geometrical frustration which is common to these magnets, we recently investigated the effects of spin-lattice coupling on spin-glass transitions. We found that many aspects of the puzzling spin-glass behaviors can be explained by a cooperative effect of the sensitivity to randomness inherent in geometrically frustrated magnets and the modification of degenerate manifold into a semidiscrete form by spin-lattice coupling.