Glassy Dynamics in a Frustrated Spin System: Role of Defects

A class of models with self-generated disorder and controlled frustration is studied. Between the trivial case, where frustration is not present at all, and the limit case, where frustration is present over every length scale, a region with local frustration is found where glassy dynamics appears. We suggest that in this region, the mean field model might undergo a p-spin like transition, and increasing the range of frustration, a crossover from a 1-step replica symmetry brea...

Within the wide class of disordered materials, spin glasses occupy a special place because of their conceptually simple definition of randomly interacting spins. Their modelling has triggered spectacular developments of out-of-equilibrium statistical physics, as well analytically as numerically, opening the way to a new vision of glasses in general. "Real" spin glasses are disordered magnetic materials which can be very diverse from the chemist's point of view, but all share ...

Spin glasses are magnetic systems exhibiting both quenched disorder and frustration, and have often been cited as examples of `complex systems.' In this talk I review some of the basic notions of spin glass physics, and discuss how some of our recent progress in understanding their properties might lead to new viewpoints of how they manifest `complexity'.

We review recent findings on spin glass models. Both the equilibrium properties and the dynamic properties are covered. We focus on progress in theoretical, in particular numerical, studies, while its relationship to real magnetic materials is also mentioned.

An introduction and overview is given of the theory of spin glasses and its application.

We review several models of glassy systems where the randomness is self generated, i.e. already an infinitesimal amount of disorder is sufficient to cause a transition to a non-ergodic, glassy state. We discuss the application of the replica formalism developed for the spin glass systems to study the glass transition in uniformly frustrated many-body systems. Here a localization in configuration space emerges leading to an entropy crisis of the system. Using a combination of ...

In this work a short overview of the development of spin glass theories, mainly long and short range Ising models, are presented.

In these lectures I will review some theoretical results that have been obtained for spin glasses. I will concentrate my attention on the formulation of the mean field approach and on its numerical and experimental verifications. I will present the various hypothesis at the basis of the theory and I will discuss their mathematical and physical status.

This paper gives an introduction to some of the statistical physics problems which appear in the study of structural glasses. It is a shortened and updated version of a more detailed review paper which has appeared in cond-mat/0005173.

To understand the origin of the dynamical transition, between high temperature exponential relaxation and low temperature nonexponential relaxation, that occurs well above the static transition in glassy systems, a frustrated spin model, with and without disorder, is considered. The model has two phase transitions, the lower being a standard spin glass transition (in presence of disorder) or fully frustrated Ising (in absence of disorder), and the higher being a Potts transit...