Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Antiferromagnetic interaction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An anti-ferromagnetic interaction acts to anti-align neighboring spins. If the energy is expressed as the sum of all pairs, i, j, over an interaction term J(i,j), times the spin of atom i times the spin of atom j, J<0 is a ferromagnetic interaction and J>0 is an antiferromagnetic interaction. The combination of both can lead to spin glass behavior.
Unlike ferromagnetism, anti-ferromagnetic interactions can lead to multiple optimal states (ground states—states of minimal energy). In one dimension, the anti-ferromagnetic ground state is an alternating series of spins: up, down, up, down, etc. Yet in two dimensions, multiple ground states can occur.
Consider an equilateral triangle with three spins, one on each vertex. If each spin can take on only two values (up or down), there are 2^3=8 possible states of the system, six of which are ground states! The only two which are not are with all three spins up or down. In any of the other six states, there will be two favorable interactions and one unfavorable one. This illustrates frustration: the inability of the system to find a single ground state. This is similar to a real system called a Kagome lattice.