Long-range Magnetic Ordering in Artificial Kagome Spin Ice

Abstract

The extent of magnetic ordering in highly-frustrated thermally active artificial kagome spin ice is limited by the lowest achievable blocking temperature, as the moments freeze before ordering is achieved [1]. A more substantial degree of magnetic ordering can be achieved by either lowering the blocking temperature of the individual nanomagnets or by increasing the critical transition temperature of the system. First, we pursue an approach of introducing interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI), which lowers the blocking temperature by a factor of five, while keeping the transition temperature unchanged [2]. We demonstrate that a seven-ring kagome structure consisting of 30 nanomagnets with DMI can be thermally annealed into its ground state. Furthermore, the spin-ice correlations extracted from extended kagome lattices are found to exhibit the quantitative signatures of long-range charge-order, thereby giving experimental evidence for the theoretically predicted continuous transition to a charge-ordered state. Second, we find that slight modifications of the nanomagnets at the vertices in the artificial kagome ice allow us to control the energy landscape which leads to an increase of the critical temperatures [3]. These results provide paths for the tuning of magnetic ordering in artificial spin systems.