Crystallizing Kagome artificial spin ice

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to control dipolar interactions in Kagome artificial spin ice by tuning nanobar lengths, enabling access to ground states and facilitating exploration of exotic phases and collective behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to manipulate vertex degeneracy in artificial spin ices through nanobar length tuning, allowing realization of previously inaccessible ground states.

Findings

Successfully realized multiple low energy microstates.

Achieved the long-range ordered spin crystal ground state.

Demonstrated control over vertex degeneracy in Kagome spin ice.

Abstract

Artificial spin ices are engineered arrays of dipolarly coupled nanobar magnets. They enable direct investigations of fascinating collective phenomena from their diverse microstates. However, experimental access to ground states in the geometrically frustrated systems has proven difficult, limiting studies and applications of novel properties and functionalities from the low energy states. Here, we introduce a convenient approach to control the competing diploar interactions between the neighboring nanomagnets, allowing us to tailor the vertex degeneracy of the ground states. We achieve this by tuning the length of selected nanobar magnets in the spin ice lattice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by realizing multiple low energy microstates in a Kagome artificial spin ice, particularly the hardly accessible long range ordered ground state - the spin crystal state. Our strategy can be directly applied to other artificial spin systems to achieve exotic phases and explore new emergent collective behaviors.