  Homogeneous populations of oscillators have recently been shown to exhibit
stable coexistence of coherent and incoherent regions. Generalizing the concept
of chimera states to the context of order-disorder transition in systems at
thermal equilibrium, we show analytically that such complex ordering can appear
in a system of Ising spins, possibly the simplest physical system exhibiting
this phenomenon. We also show numerically the existence of chimera ordering in
3-dimensional spin systems that model layered magnetic materials, suggesting
possible means of experimentally observing such states.
