spin glasses

Spin glasses are disordered magnetic materials where atomic magnetic moments, or spins, are randomly aligned, leading to complex interactions. Unlike regular magnets with uniform alignment, spins in spin glasses freeze into a disordered state at low temperatures, resulting in a landscape of many nearly equivalent configurations. This creates sluggish dynamics and history-dependent behaviors, similar to how glasses (like window glass) behave in the structural context. Spin glasses are important for understanding complex systems with competing interactions, and they provide insights into optimization problems, neural networks, and other systems exhibiting frustration and disorder.