Emergent Magnetic Monopole in Artificial Polariton Spin Ice

TL;DR

This paper proposes a polariton-based artificial spin ice system that can generate, manipulate, and observe magnetic monopole-like excitations through polarization control and real-space imaging.

Contribution

It introduces a driven-dissipative polariton realization of artificial spin ice with dynamic enforcement of ice rules and observable monopole defects.

Findings

Polariton lattices can host emergent gauge charges.

Local polarization flips create monopole-antimonopole pairs.

Sequential flips enable defect transport and Dirac string formation.

Abstract

Artificial spin ice provides a versatile setting for emergent gauge fields and magnetic monopole excitations. Here we propose a driven-dissipative polariton realization of artificial spin ice, in which the circular polarization of each link mode plays the role of an Ising degree of freedom, while an auxiliary lossy vertex mode dynamically enforces a local ice-rule constraint. Adiabatic elimination of the vertex mode yields an effective spin-ice penalty, favoring the two-in two-out manifold in the steady state. We show that local polarization flips generate monopole-antimonopole defects, and that sequential flips transport these defects across the lattice while defining a Dirac string. In an extended spin-ice geometry, the vertex charges and their dynamics can be directly reconstructed from polarization-resolved real-space imaging. Our results establish polariton lattices as a controllable photonic platform for creating, manipulating, and observing emergent gauge charges in nonequilibrium spin-ice systems.