Physicists who study condensed matter are interested in the properties that emerge when many molecules or atoms interact. One such emergent property is crystalline order among atoms; another is its opposite, the glass state, which involves rapid cooling through a melting temperature.

'Frustration', the inability of a system to find a unique ground state, is a common feature of disordered solids. Frustration can also arise in an ordered solid solely from geometric considerations, and this is increasingly being recognized as an organizing principle that governs a wide range of physical phenomena in the collective behaviour of atoms. Yet, contrary to the implication of their name, frustrated systems actually have more configurational options than conventional collective systems. The basic concepts of frustrated systems are turning out to have practical uses in areas from microelectronics to drug delivery.

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