We study a class of disordered continuous classical spin systems including the kagome Heisenberg magnet. While each term in its local Hamiltonian can be independently minimised, we find {\it discrete} degenerate ground states whose number grows exponentially with system size. These states do not exhibit zero-energy `excitations' characteristic of highly frustrated magnets but instead are local minima of the energy landscape, albeit with an anomalously soft excitation spectrum. This represents a spin liquid version of the phenomenon of jamming familiar from granular media and structural glasses. Correlations of this jammed spin liquid, which upon increasing the disorder strength gives way to a conventional spin glass, may be algebraic (Coulomb-type) or exponential.
@article{arxiv.1706.04004,
title = {Jammed spin liquid in the bond-disordered kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet},
author = {Thomas Bilitewski and Mike E. Zhitomirsky and Roderich Moessner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.04004},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
version accepted for publication in PRL 5+6 pages, 5+12 figures