Spin Ice State in Frustrated Magnetic Pyrochlore Materials

By S. Bramwell, Michel J. P. Gingras. Science, 2001

1,349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A frustrated system is one whose symmetry precludes the possibility that every pairwise interaction (“bond”) in the system can be satisfied at the same time. Such systems are common in all areas of physical and biological science. In the most extreme cases, they can have a disordered ground state with “macroscopic” degeneracy; that is, one that comprises a huge number of equivalent states of the same energy. Pauling's description of the low-temperature proton disorder in water ice was perhaps the first recognition of this phenomenon and remains the paradigm. In recent years, a new class of magnetic substance has been characterized, in which the disorder of the magnetic moments at low temperatures is precisely analogous to the proton disorder in water ice. These substances, known as spin ice materials, are perhaps the “cleanest” examples of such highly frustrated systems yet discovered. They offer an unparalleled opportunity for the study of frustration in magnetic systems at both an experimental and a theoretical level. This article describes the essential physics of spin ice, as it is currently understood, and identifies new avenues for future research on related materials and models.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ea7e452830ba6db660b2e92b53f3d89c4fcc985

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Citations in the corpus

Thermal ground-state ordering and elementary excitations in artificial magnetic square ice (2011, background): “Recently, magnetic analogues, in the form of naturally occurrin”
Real-space observation of emergent magnetic monopoles and associated Dirac strings in artificial kagome spin ice (2011, background): “These systems are characterized by so-called ice rules, where, in the tetrahedral coordination of the pyrochlore structure, two of the four Ising type spins on the vertices point towards the tetrahedral centre whereas the other two spins point awa”
Direct observation of magnetic monopole defects in an artificial spin-ice system (2010, background): “Spin-ice materials such as Dy 2 Ti 2 O 7 have been subject to an intense research effor”
Quantum Excitations in Quantum Spin Ice (2011, background): “The best explored materials exhibiting this frustration are the ‘‘spin ice’’ compounds, Ho2Ti2O7, Dy2Ti2O7, in which the moments can be regarded as classical spins with a strong easyaxis (Ising) anisotropy [2,3].”
Creation and measurement of long-lived magnetic monopole currents in spin ice (2011, methodology): “It can then be used to test equation (4), which is directly derived from theWien effect, by plotting 1+μf/QlTnf versus the Onsager dimensionless parameter b, where we expect data collapse onto the function f (b) = 1+ b/2+ b2/12+ .”
Multiferroic materials and magnetoelectric physics: symmetry, entanglement, excitation, and topology (2015, background): “39, the cornershared 4f magnetic moments form the 2-in-2-out configuration for each tetrahedron at low temperature, which is called the ice-rule [450].”