Emergent long-tail dynamics in driven magnets with dynamical frustration

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that dynamical frustration can spontaneously occur in driven classical spin systems, leading to emergent spin-ice physics and non-ergodic monopole dynamics with long-tailed waiting times, influenced by drive parameters and initial states.

Contribution

It reveals how dynamical frustration and spin-ice physics can emerge in driven, frustration-free magnetic systems, highlighting the role of drive-induced interactions and non-ergodic monopole behavior.

Findings

Emergence of spin-ice physics under periodic driving.

Long-tailed power-law distributions in monopole waiting times.

Sensitivity of heating times to initial conditions.

Abstract

In this study, we show that dynamical frustration can spontaneously emerge in frustration-free magnetic systems under periodic driving. Specifically, we consider a classical spin system and demonstrate the emergence of spin-ice physics when drive-induced heating is well suppressed. In particular, we focus on the dynamics of magnetic monopole excitations, which, in sharp contrast to their equilibrium counterparts, exhibit a non-ergodic stochastic random-walk process with long-tailed, power-law distributed waiting times, where the power-law exponent is tunable by the system's effective temperature. Heating is accelerated at intermediate driving frequencies, and the system eventually heats up to an infinite-temperature state. However, the heating time is extremely sensitive to different initial-state realizations and also follows a long-tailed power-law distribution. We show that a drive-induced short-range attractive interaction between monopoles is responsible for the long-tailed distributions observed in both monopole and heating dynamics.