# Jammed spin liquid in the bond-disordered kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet

## TL;DR

This paper investigates a disordered kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet revealing a jammed spin liquid state characterized by exponentially many degenerate ground states and a landscape of local minima, bridging concepts from spin liquids and jamming phenomena.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel jammed spin liquid phase in disordered classical spin systems, highlighting its ground state degeneracy and energy landscape features.

## Key findings

- Exponential growth of degenerate ground states with system size.
- Presence of local minima without zero-energy excitations.
- Transition from jammed spin liquid to spin glass with increasing disorder.

## Abstract

We study a class of disordered continuous classical spin systems including the kagome Heisenberg magnet. While each term in its local Hamiltonian can be independently minimised, we find {\it discrete} degenerate ground states whose number grows exponentially with system size. These states do not exhibit zero-energy `excitations' characteristic of highly frustrated magnets but instead are local minima of the energy landscape, albeit with an anomalously soft excitation spectrum. This represents a spin liquid version of the phenomenon of jamming familiar from granular media and structural glasses. Correlations of this jammed spin liquid, which upon increasing the disorder strength gives way to a conventional spin glass, may be algebraic (Coulomb-type) or exponential.