# Spin liquid and infinitesimal-disorder-driven cluster spin glass in the kagome lattice

## TL;DR

This study explores how geometric frustration and minimal disorder in the Ising kagome lattice lead to a spin-liquid state that is highly sensitive to disorder, resulting in cluster spin-glass behavior with potential relevance to real materials.

## Contribution

It introduces a cluster approach combined with replica formalism to analyze the effects of infinitesimal disorder on spin liquids in the kagome lattice, revealing a mechanism for spin-glass formation.

## Key findings

- Cluster freezing occurs at very low disorder levels.
- Spin-liquid behavior prevents long-range order but is sensitive to disorder.
- Infinitesimal disorder induces a cluster spin-glass state.

## Abstract

The interplay between geometric frustration (GF) and bond disorder is studied in the Ising kagome lattice within a cluster approach. The model considers antiferromagnetic (AF) short-range couplings and long-range intercluster disordered interactions. The replica formalism is used to obtain an effective single cluster model from where the thermodynamics is analyzed by exact diagonalization. We found that the presence of GF can introduce cluster freezing at very low levels of disorder. The system exhibits an entropy plateau followed by a large entropy drop close to the freezing temperature. In this scenario, a spin-liquid (SL) behavior prevents conventional long-range order, but an infinitesimal disorder picks out uncompensated cluster states from the multi degenerate SL regime, potentializing the intercluster disordered coupling and bringing the cluster spin-glass state. To summarize, our results suggest that the SL state combined with low levels of disorder can activate small clusters, providing hypersensitivity to the freezing process in geometrically frustrated materials and playing a key role in the glassy stabilization. We propose that this physical mechanism could be present in several geometrically frustrated materials. In particular, we discuss our results in connection to the recent experimental investigations of the Ising kagome compound Co$_3$Mg(OH)$_6$Cl$_2$.