Direct Visualization of the Magnetic Monopole Field in a 3D Artificial Spin Ice

TL;DR

This study directly visualizes the three-dimensional magnetic field structure of monopole-like excitations in artificial spin ice, revealing their complex magnetic charge and moment interactions, and demonstrating tunable monopole coupling through lattice geometry.

Contribution

It introduces a method to directly image and analyze 3D magnetic monopoles in artificial spin ice, uncovering their non-trivial micromagnetic properties and tunable interactions.

Findings

Monopoles exhibit highly divergent stray magnetic fields.

Monopoles carry both magnetic charge and intrinsic magnetic moment.

Monopole interactions can be tuned by lattice geometry.

Abstract

Magnetic monopoles, long hypothesised as fundamental particles carrying isolated magnetic charge, emerge in spin-ice systems as fractionalised excitations governed by the ice rule. Yet their three-dimensional field structure has never been directly visualised. Here, we use two-photon lithography and processing to fabricate a fully three-dimensional artificial spin-ice lattice with diamond-bond geometry. We then use scanning nitrogen-vacancy magnetometry to directly measure the stray magnetic fields of both charge-neutral and monopole vertices. We find that ice-rule vertices produce antivortex textures directly above their vertices, stabilised by the local frustrated two-in/two out ordering principle. Direct imaging of the monopole stray field shows a highly divergent profile. By correlating experiment with micromagnetic simulations and performing a multipole expansion of the reconstructed magnetisation, we reveal that monopoles in 3DASI are non-trivial micromagnetic entities, carrying both magnetic charge and an intrinsic moment, giving rise to anisotropic interactions that are dependent upon the quasiparticles position on the lattice. Results suggest that as monopoles separate under an applied field, the dipolar contribution to their interaction reorients relative to the underlying Coulombic field, revealing that monopole coupling is tunable through geometry, being set by the local vertex topology. These findings establish 3DASI as a programmable magnetic metamaterial in which nanoscale geometry governs the energetics and dynamics of emergent magnetic charges.