Great moments in disorder

Energetic analysis of disorder effects in an artificial spin ice with dipolar interactions

We study the effect of quenched disorder in square artificial spin ice by means of numerical simulations. We introduce disorder in the length of magnetic islands using two kinds of distributions: Gaussian and uniform. As the system behavior depends on its geometrical parameters, we focus on studying it in the proximity of the ice regime which is quite difficult to thermalize both in experiments and simulations. We show how length disorder affect the antiferromagnetic and (locally) ferromagnetic ordering, by inducing the system, in the case of weak disorder, to intermediate or mix states. Moreover, in the case of strong disorder, ferromagnetic plaquettes prevail regardless of whether the mean length of the islands corresponds to an antiferromagnetic ordering.

Degeneracy and criticality from emergent frustration in artificial spin ice

Although initially introduced to mimic the spin-ice pyrochlores, no artificial spin ice has yet exhibited the expected degenerate ice phase with critical correlations similar to the celebrated Coulomb phase in the pyrochlore lattice. Here we study a novel artificial spin ice based on a vertex-frustrated rather than pairwise frustrated geometry and show that it exhibits a quasicritical ice phase of extensive residual entropy and, significantly, algebraic correlations. Interesting in its own regard as a novel realization of frustration in a vertex system, our lattice opens new pathways to study defects in a critical manifold and to design degeneracy in artificial magnetic nanoarrays, a task so far elusive.

Exactly solvable interacting spin-ice vertex model

A special family of solvable five-vertex model is introduced on a square lattice. In addition to the usual nearest-neighbor interactions, the vertices defining the model also interact along one of the diagonals of the lattice. This family of models includes in a special limit the standard six-vertex model. The exact solution of these models is an application of the matrix product ansatz introduced recently and applied successfully in the solution of quantum chains. The phase diagram and the free energy of the models are calculated in the thermodynamic limit. The models exhibit massless phases, and our analytical and numerical analyses indicate that such phases are governed by a conformal field theory with central charge c=1 and continuously varying critical exponents.

Artificial square ice and related dipolar nanoarrays

We study a frustrated dipolar array recently manufactured lithographically by Wang in order to realize the square ice model in an artificial structure. We discuss models for thermodynamics and dynamics of this system. We show that an ice regime can be stabilized by small changes in the array geometry; a different magnetic state, kagome ice, can similarly be constructed. At low temperatures, the square ice regime is terminated by a thermodynamic ordering transition, which can be chosen to be ferro- or antiferromagnetic. We show that the arrays do not fully equilibrate experimentally, and identify a likely dynamical bottleneck.