Geometrically frustrated coarsening dynamics in spinor Bose-Fermi mixtures

Coarsening dynamics theory describes equilibration of a broad class of systems. By studying the relaxation of a periodic array of microcondensates immersed in a Fermi gas, which mediates long-range spin interactions to simulate frustrated classical magnets, we show that coarsening dynamics can be suppressed by geometrical frustration. The system is found to eventually approach a metastable state which is robust against random field noise and characterized by finite correlation lengths together with the emergence of topologically stable Z2 vortices. We find universal scaling laws with no thermal-equilibrium analog that relate the correlation lengths and the number of vortices to the degree of frustration in the system.