Magnetic charge and ordering in kagome spin ice

Abstract

We present a numerical study of magnetic ordering in spin ice on kagome, a two-dimensional lattice of corner-sharing triangles. The magnet has six ground states and the ordering occurs in two stages, as one might expect for a six-state clock model. In spin ice with short-range interactions up to second neighbours, there is an intermediate critical phase separated from the paramagnetic and ordered phases by Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transitions. In dipolar spin ice, the intermediate phase has long-range order of staggered magnetic charges. The high- and low-temperature phase transitions are of the Ising and 3-state Potts universality classes, respectively. Freeze-out of defects in the charge order produce a very large spin correlation length in the intermediate phase. As a result of that, the lower-temperature transition appears to be of the KT type.