Spin Glass - Non-ergodic Behavior and Applications

Non-ergodic Behavior and Applications

A so-called non-ergodic behavior happens in spin glasses below the freezing temperature, since below that temperature the system cannot escape from the ultradeep minima of the hierarchically-disordered energy landscape. Although the freezing temperature is typically as low as 30 kelvin (−240 degrees Celsius), so that the spin glass magnetism appears to be practically without applications in daily life, there are applications in different contexts, e.g. in the already mentioned theory of neural networks, i.e. in theoretical brain research, and in the mathematical-economical theory of optimization.