Glassy behavior of two-dimensional stripe-forming systems

Abstract

We study two dimensional frustrated but non-disordered systems applying a replica approach to a stripe forming model with competing interactions. The phenomenology of the model is representative of several well known systems, like high-Tc superconductors and ultrathin ferromagnetic films, which have been the subject of intense research. We establish the existence of a glass transition to a non-ergodic regime accompanied by an exponential number of long lived metastable states, responsible for slow dynamics and non-equilibrium effects.