  New effects in the frustrated transverse Ising ring are predicted. The system
is solved based on a mapping of Pauli spin operators to the Jordan-Wigner
fermions. We group the low-lying energy levels into bands after imposing
appropriate parity constraint, which projects out the redundant degrees of
freedom brought about by the Jordan-Wigner fermions. In the region of strong
antiferromagnetic coupling, we uncover an unusual gapless phase induced by the
ring frustration. We demonstrate that its ground state exhibits a strong
longitudinal spin-spin correlation and possesses a considerably large entropy
of entanglement. The low-lying energy levels evolve adiabatically in the
gapless phase, which facilitates us to work out new behaviors of density of
states, low-temperature correlation functions and specific heat. We also
propose an experimental protocol for observing this peculiar gapless phase.
