Abstract
The nature of magnetic correlation at low temperature in two‐dimensional artificial magnetic honeycomb lattice is a strongly debated issue. While theoretical researches suggest that the system will develop a novel zero entropy spin solid state as T → 0 K, a confirmation to this effect in artificial honeycomb lattice of connected elements is lacking. This study reports on the investigation of magnetic correlation in newly designed artificial permalloy honeycomb lattice of ultrasmall elements, with a typical length of ≈12 nm, using neutron scattering measurements and temperature‐dependent micromagnetic simulations. Numerical modeling of the polarized neutron reflectometry data elucidates the temperature‐dependent evolution of spin correlation in this system. As temperature reduces to ≈7 K, the system tends to develop novel spin solid state, manifested by the alternating distribution of magnetic vortex loops of opposite chiralities. Experimental results are complemented by temperature‐dependent micromagnetic simulations that confirm the dominance of spin solid state over local magnetic charge ordered state in the artificial honeycomb lattice with connected elements. These results enable a direct investigation of novel spin solid correlation in the connected honeycomb geometry of 2D artificial structure.
Highlights
The nature of magnetic correlation at low temperature in two-dimensional by the distribution of magnetic vortex loops of opposite chiralities.[3,4] The comartificial magnetic honeycomb lattice is a strongly debated issue
Experimental results are where two of the moments along the complemented by temperature-dependent micromagnetic simulations that honeycomb element point to the vertex confirm the dominance of spin solid state over local magnetic charge ordered state in the artificial honeycomb lattice with connected elements
We report the investigation of the spin solid state in artificial honeycomb lattice of connected ultrasmall elements
Summary
The fabrication of artificial honeycomb lattice samples involved the synthesis of hexagonal diblock copolymer templates and near parallel deposition of permalloy material on top of the honeycomb structured silicon substrates in an ultrahigh vacuum chamber. We have performed temperaturedependent micromagnetic simulations on an artificial honeycomb lattice of similar element size and thickness to independently verify the development of a spin solid state at low temperature. The different magnetic states were simulated in our Distorted Wave Born Approximation (DWBA) model (see the Experimental Section for more information).[29,30] As shown in the lower panel of Figure 2, the off-specular scattering increases with the amount of spin–spin correlation in the system. Unlike the development of vortex state near zero field at low temperature, the magnetization profile at T = 100 K depicts short-ranged ordered spin ice state (see the color map). The micromagnetic simulations further confirm the development of spin solid state
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