ABSTRACT

The concept of frustration was introduced in physics by Gérard Toulouse and Philip Anderson to designate the absence in certain magnetic systems (spin glasses) of a global configuration of the spins allowing all pairs of neighboring spins to achieve a local configuration of minimal energy. An obvious example of magnetic frustration is provided by a triangular lattice of spins in antiferromagnetic interaction (i.e., two neighboring spins prefer a “head to tail” orientation.