TY - JOUR
T1 - Thermodynamics of emergent magnetic charge screening in artificial spin ice
AU - Farhan, Alan
AU - Scholl, Andreas
AU - Petersen, Charlotte F.
AU - Anghinolfi, Luca
AU - Wuth, Clemens
AU - Dhuey, Scott
AU - Chopdekar, Rajesh V.
AU - Mellado, Paula
AU - Alava, Mikko J.
AU - Van Dijken, Sebastiaan
N1 - Funding Information:
This project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and part of this work was performed at the ALS, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 94720 Berkeley, USA. The ALS is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. C.F.P. and M.J.A. are supported by the Academy of Finland through its Centres of Excellence Programme (2012-2017) under project no. 251748 and the FiDiPro program, project 13282993.
PY - 2016/9/1
Y1 - 2016/9/1
N2 - Electric charge screening is a fundamental principle governing the behaviour in a variety of systems in nature. Through reconfiguration of the local environment, the Coulomb attraction between electric charges is decreased, leading, for example, to the creation of polaron states in solids or hydration shells around proteins in water. Here, we directly visualize the real-time creation and decay of screened magnetic charge configurations in a two-dimensional artificial spin ice system, the dipolar dice lattice. By comparing the temperature dependent occurrence of screened and unscreened emergent magnetic charge defects, we determine that screened magnetic charges are indeed a result of local energy reduction and appear as a transient minimum energy state before the system relaxes towards the predicted ground state. These results highlight the important role of emergent magnetic charges in artificial spin ice, giving rise to screened charge excitations and the emergence of exotic low-temperature configurations.
AB - Electric charge screening is a fundamental principle governing the behaviour in a variety of systems in nature. Through reconfiguration of the local environment, the Coulomb attraction between electric charges is decreased, leading, for example, to the creation of polaron states in solids or hydration shells around proteins in water. Here, we directly visualize the real-time creation and decay of screened magnetic charge configurations in a two-dimensional artificial spin ice system, the dipolar dice lattice. By comparing the temperature dependent occurrence of screened and unscreened emergent magnetic charge defects, we determine that screened magnetic charges are indeed a result of local energy reduction and appear as a transient minimum energy state before the system relaxes towards the predicted ground state. These results highlight the important role of emergent magnetic charges in artificial spin ice, giving rise to screened charge excitations and the emergence of exotic low-temperature configurations.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84984889451&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/ncomms12635
DO - 10.1038/ncomms12635
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84984889451
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 7
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
M1 - 12635
ER -