Ideal superspin glass behaviour in a random-close-packed ensemble of maghemite nanoparticles

Abstract

Highly uniform (8 nm) bare maghemite nanoparticles were pressed into a disc with a volume fraction close to the characteristic filling factor of random-close-packed ensembles of spherical particles. We review the ideal superspin glass behaviour exhibited by this material, including an onset of the absorption component of the ac susceptibility at the freezing transition as sharp (in a normalized temperature scale) as those observed in atomic spin glasses, narrow memory dips in the zero-field cooled magnetization, and a spin-glass characteristic field-dependence of the susceptibility. Critical exponents were extracted from static and dynamic scaling analysis.