Spin Ice, Fractionalization, and Topological Order

By Claudio Castelnovo, Roderich Moessner, Shiv Sondhi. 2011

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The spin ice compounds Dy2Ti2O7 and Ho2Ti2O7 are highly unusual magnets that epitomize a set of concepts of great interest in modern condensed matter physics: Their low-energy physics exhibits an emergent gauge field and their excitations are magnetic monopoles that arise from the fractionalization of the microscopic magnetic spin degrees of freedom. In this review, we provide an elementary introduction to these concepts and we survey the thermodynamics, statics, and dynamics—in and out of equilibrium—of spin ice from these vantage points. Along the way, we touch on topics such as emergent Coulomb plasmas, observable Dirac strings, and irrational charges. We close with the outlook for these unique materials.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6ad0516dccaaef7aa226be93ea2740eb7cd7af4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Roderich Moessner
2. V. Khemani
3. Anushya Chandran
4. Thomas Iadecola
5. R. Cava
6. Steven A. Kivelson
7. M. Norman
8. T. Senthil

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Roderich Moessner
2. T. Senthil
3. R. Cava
4. Anushya Chandran
5. Steven A. Kivelson
6. M. Norman
7. V. Khemani
8. S. Sachdev

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Roderich Moessner
2. T. Senthil
3. R. McKenzie
4. B. Powell

Citations in the corpus

• Quantum spin liquids (2019, background): “Given the importance of the gauge theory description, it is not surprising that many concepts in particle physics have been realized in the spin liquid context, including magnetic monopolelike excitations, which have been proposed in the context of the three-dimensional (3D) pyrochlore lattice (36).”
• Quantum Many-Body Scars: A Quasiparticle Perspective (2022, background): “This is the case here with the Rydberg blockade, and appears analogously in the avoidance of double occupancy in high-temperature superconductors via a Gutzwiller projection (147, 148), in enforcing the ice rules in spin ice yielding an emergent magnetostatics (149), or in minimizing kinetic energy ”