  The ground state of highly damped PdNi based 0-pi ferromagnetic Josephson
junctions shows a spontaneous half quantum vortex, sustained by a supercurrent
of undetermined sign. This supercurrent flows in the electrode of a Josephson
junction used as a detector and produces a phi(0)/4 shift in its magnetic
diffraction pattern. We have measured the statistics of the positive or
negative sign shift occurring at the superconducting transition of such a
junction. The randomness of the shift sign, the reproducibility of its
magnitude and the possibility of achieving exact flux compensation upon field
cooling: all these features show that 0-pi junctions behave as classical spins,
just as magnetic nanoparticles with uniaxial anisotropy.
