A zero temperature dynamics of Ising spin glasses and ferromagnets on random
graphs of finite connectivity is considered, like granular media these systems
have an extensive entropy of metastable states. We consider the problem of what
energy a randomly prepared spin system falls to before becoming stuck in a
metastable state. We then introduce a tapping mechanism, analogous to that of
real experiments on granular media, this tapping, corresponding to flipping
simultaneously any spin with probability p, leads to stationary regime with a
steady state energy E(p). We explicitly solve this problem for the one
dimensional ferromagnet and ±J spin glass and carry out extensive
numerical simulations for spin systems of higher connectivity. The link with
the density of metastable states at fixed energy and the idea of Edwards that
one may construct a thermodynamics with a flat measure over metastable states
is discussed. In addition our simulations on the ferromagnetic systems reveal a
novel first order transition, whereas the usual thermodynamic transition on
these graphs is second order.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure