Spin-glass effects

The frustration effects are implicit in many physical systems, as different as spin glass magnets, adsorbed monomolecular films and liquid crystals [32, 54, 55], In the case of polar mesogens the dipolar frustrations may be modelled by a spin system on a triangular lattice (Fig, 5), The corresponding Hamiltonian consists of a two particle dipolar potential that has competing parallel dipole and antiparallel dipole interactions [321, The system is analyzed in terms of dimers and trimers of dipoles. When the dipolar forces between two of them cancel, the third dipole experiences no overall interaction. It is free to permeate out of the layer, thus frustrating smectic order. 

The concept of a nonequilibrium temperature has stimulated a lot of research in the area of glasses. This line of research has been promoted by Cugliandolo and Kurchan in the study of mean-held models of spin glasses [161, 162] that show violations of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT) in the NEAS. The main result in the theory is that two-time correlations C t,t ) and responses R t, f ) satisfy a modihed version of the FDT. It is customary to introduce the effective temperature through the fluctuation-dissipation ratio (FDR) [163] dehned as... 

We applied the hole digging method to several samples of molecular clusters and quantum spin glasses. The most detailed study has been done on the Fe8 system. We found the predicted square-root t relaxation, Eq. (11), in experiments on fully saturated Fe8 crystals [16, 79] and on nonsaturated samples [34]. Figure 22 analyzes the dipolar distributions, revealing a remarkable structure due to next-nearest-neighbor effects [34]. These results are in good agreement with simulations [80, 55]. 

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