Geometrical frustration is a phenomenon in condensed matter physics in which the geometrical properties of the atomic lattice forbid the existence of a unique ground state. The most important consequence of this is that the entropy of the system does not go to zero at absolute zero. An example of a geometrically frustrated material is ordinary water ice, which has a residual entropy of around 3.40 J/K/mol. Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic physical properties of matter. ... In mineralogy and crystallography, a crystal structure is a unique arrangement of atoms in a crystal. ... In physics, the ground state of a quantum mechanical system is its lowest-energy state. ... The thermodynamic entropy S, often simply called the entropy in the context of thermodynamics, is a measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do work. ... Absolute zero is the highest temperature that can be obtained in any macroscopic system. ... Icicles A natural ice block in Iceland Ice is the solid form of water. ...
The large degeneracy of states resulting from the geometricalfrustration of competing interactions is an essential ingredient of important problems in fields as diverse as magnetism, protein folding, and neural networks.
Geometricallyfrustrated magnetic materials are those in which the geometry of the magnetic sublattice prevents the simultaneous minimization of the energies of different spin-spin interactions.
One important type of behavior seen in geometricallyfrustrated magnetic materials is a spin liquid state, in which frustration prevents the onset of long range order, and the spins thus continue to fluctuate down to the lowest temperatures measured.
Geometricalfrustration sounds like something a high-school math student might feel, but is actually a rich area of research in physics and material science.
In the case of zirconium tungstate, geometricalfrustration comes into play during certain temperature-related vibrations of the compound's crystal lattice structure, the configuration of atomic bonds that holds the atoms together in a crystal.
On the pure physics side, they seem to provide a new and unusual example of geometricalfrustration, which is most often studied in the realm of magnetism and disordered systems such as spin glasses.
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