In conventional spin glasses, magnetic interaction is not strongly anisotropic and the entire spin system is believed to be frozen below the spin-glass transition temperature. In La2Cu0.94Li0.06O4, for which the in-plane exchange interaction dominates the interplane one, only a fraction of spins with antiferromagnetic correlations extending to neighboring planes become spin-glass. The remaining spins with only in-plane antiferromagnetic correlations remain spin-liquid at low temperature. Such a novel partial spin freezing out of a two-dimensional spin-liquid observed in this cold neutron scattering study is likely due to a delicate balance between disorder and quantum fluctuations in the quasi-two dimensional S=1/2 Heisenberg system.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0510600,
title = {Slow spin-glass and fast spin-liquid components in quasi-two-dimensional La2(Cu,Li)O4},
author = {Y. Chen and Wei Bao and Y. Qiu and J. E. Lorenzo and J. L. Sarrao and D. L. Ho and Min Y. Lin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0510600},
year = {2007}
}