Energy minima and ordering in ferromagnets with quenched randomness

Abstract

Energy minimization at T=0 and Monte Carlo simulations at T>0 have been performed for 2D and 3D random-field and random-anisotropy systems of up to 100 million classical spins. The main finding is that 3D random-anisotropy systems magnetically order on lowering temperature, contrary to the theoretical predictions based on the Imry-Ma argument. If random-anisotropy is stronger than the exchange, which can be the case in sintered materials, the system still orders but the magnetization is strongly reduced and there is a large spin-glass component in the spin state, the heat capacity having a cusp instead of a divergence. 3D random-field systems do not magnetically order on lowering temperature but rather freeze into the correlated spin-glass state. Here, although magnetized local energy minima have lower energies than non-magnetized ones, magnetic ordering is prevented by singularities pinned by the random field.