Creation and measurement of long-lived magnetic monopole currents in spin ice

By S. Giblin, S. Bramwell, P. Holdsworth, D. Prabhakaran, I. Terry. 2011

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent discovery of ‘magnetricity’ in spin ice raises the question of whether long-lived currents of magnetic ‘monopoles’ can be created and manipulated by applying magnetic fields. Here we show that they can. By applying a magnetic-field pulse to a Dy2Ti2O7 spin-ice crystal at 0.36 K, we create a relaxing magnetic current that lasts for several minutes. We measure the current by means of the electromotive force it induces in a solenoid coupled to a sensitive amplifier, and quantitatively describe it using a chemical kinetic model of point-like charges obeying the Onsager–Wien mechanism of carrier dissociation and recombination. We thus derive the microscopic parameters of monopole motion in spin ice and identify the distinct roles of free and bound magnetic charges. Our results illustrate a basic capacitor effect for magnetic charge and should pave the way for the design and realization of ‘magnetronic’ circuitry.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea307ef56ba78f10be6fbacf271172fa31e1c4a7

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In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Roderich Moessner
2. P. Holdsworth
3. Shiv Sondhi
4. Claudio Castelnovo
5. S. Bramwell

Citations in the corpus

• Melting artificial spin ice (2011, background): “These defects carry accumulations of effective magnetic charge and, in the case of 3D spin ice, have been successfully described using the language of emergent magnetic monopoles [29, 35, 36].”
• Spin Ice, Fractionalization, and Topological Order (2011, background): “Nature 461:956–60 [64] Giblin SR, Bramwell ST, Holdsworth PCW, Prabhakaran D, Terry I.”