Switchable Magnetic Frustration in Buckyball Nanoarchitectures

TL;DR

This paper explores the micromagnetic properties of magnetic buckyball nanoarchitectures, revealing their ability to reversibly switch between different magnetic states, which could be useful for future magnonic devices.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed micromagnetic simulation study of three-dimensional magnetic buckyball structures, highlighting their unique reversible frustration properties.

Findings

Magnetic buckyballs can be magnetized in various zero-field states.

Reversible switching between frustrated and ordered states is possible.

Three-dimensional structures offer advantages over planar geometries for magnetic control.

Abstract

Recent progress in nanofabrication has led to the emergence of three-dimensional magnetic nanostructures as a vibrant field of research. This includes the study of three-dimensional arrays of interconnected magnetic nanowires with tunable artificial spin-ice properties. Prominent examples of such structures are magnetic buckyball nanoarchitectures, which consist of ferromagnetic nanowires connected at vertex positions corresponding to those of a C60 molecule. These structures can be regarded as prototypes for the study of the transition from two- to three-dimensional spin-ice lattices. In spite of their significance for three-dimensional nanomagnetism, little is known about the micromagnetic properties of buckyball nanostructures. By means of finite-element micromagnetic simulations, we investigate the magnetization structures and the hysteretic properties of several sub-micron-sized magnetic buckyballs. Similar to ordinary artificial spin ice lattices, the array can be magnetized in a variety of zero-field states with vertices exhibiting different degrees of magnetic frustration. Remarkably, and unlike planar geometries, magnetically frustrated states can be reversibly created and dissolved by applying an external magnetic field. This easiness to insert and remove defect-like magnetic charges, made possible by the angle-selectivity of the field-induced switching of individual nanowires, demonstrates a potentially significant advantage of three-dimensional nanomagnetism compared to planar geometries. The control provided by the ability to switch between ice-rule obeying and magnetically frustrated structures could be an important feature of future applications, including magnonic devices exploiting differences in the fundamental frequencies of these configurations.