Geometrical Frustration old

Frustration arises when a system cannot minimize all the pair-wise interactions simultaneously because of local geometric constraints. Competing or frustrated interactions extend beyond the condensed matter problems and into biological materials. In that respect, nature has the ability to "resolve" frustrated interactions in order to perform specific biological activity.

Frustration may give-rise to novel and complex phenomena that motivate us to (i) develop new class of materials (ii) study cooperative phenomena in magnetism that provide fertile ground for testing theories of interacting systems that possess different spatial dimensions, ranges, and sign of interactions, and that exhibit local anisotropy of the basic interacting unit, the spin.