Spin Glass Phenomenology in Frustrated Magnetic Spinners

Spin glasses are magnetic systems characterised by disorder in the strength of interactions, whose complexity can not be approached with conventional methods. Theoretical formalisms have been developed to study their energy landscapes, but validating the results is challenging without macroscopic physical systems to test properties through direct observation.

This work aims to study the energy landscape of macroscopic setups of magnetic spinners on a lattice, searching for spin glass phenomenology by comparing physical observations with simulation results. Ground states and metastable states will be studied, based on the assumption that the ratio between the activation energy for an event and the thermal energy is very large, freezing the system in local minima.

The study of lines of spinners concluded that the number of states grows exponentially with the system's size, a property of spin glasses. Simulations of hexagonal, tetragonal, and orthorhombic lattices of different sizes showed that, in systems larger than spinners, the values of energy per spinner of the states follow Gaussian distributions with constant average and standard deviation approaching zero, as the size of the system increases, resulting in infinite systems in which all stationary configurations possess the same energy per spinner value.

Additionally, the sets of states exhibit increasingly ultrametric structure when considering specific local metrics. These findings indicate that there is glass phenomenology in systems of spinners. Future works will focus on dynamics to fully explore all possible states in which a spin glass can be observed.