Proposal for the Detection of Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice via Nanoscale Magnetometry

Abstract

We present a proposal for applying nanoscale magnetometry to the search for magnetic monopoles in the spin ice materials holmium and dysprosium titanate. Employing Monte Carlo simulations of the dipolar spin ice model, we find that when cooled to below $1.5$K these materials exhibit a sufficiently low monopole density to enable the direct observation of magnetic fields from individual monopoles. At these temperatures we demonstrate that noise spectroscopy can capture the intrinsic fluctuations associated with monopole dynamics, allowing one to isolate the qualitative effects associated with both the Coulomb interaction between monopoles and the topological constraints implied by Dirac strings. We describe in detail three different nanoscale magnetometry platforms (muon spin rotation, nitrogen vacancy defects, and nanoSQUID arrays) that can be used to detect monopoles in these experiments, and analyze the advantages of each.

5 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Sensitivity Optimization for NV-Diamond Magnetometry
• Magnetic Monopole Noise
• Diagnosing phases of magnetic insulators via noise magnetometry with spin qubits
• Dynamical fractal and anomalous noise in a clean magnetic crystal
• Universal prethermal dynamics in Heisenberg ferromagnets
• Anomalous Magnetoresistance by Breaking Ice Rule in Bi2Ir2O7/Dy2Ti2O7 Heterostructure
• Equilibrium Field Theory of Magnetic Monopoles in Degenerate Square Spin Ice: Correlations, Entropic Interactions, and Charge Screening Regimes
• The Concept of Spin Ice Graphs and a Field Theory for their Topological Monopoles and Charges
• Spiral Spin Liquid Noise
• Emergent Gauge Fields in Band Insulators
• Dichotomous Dynamics of Magnetic Monopole Fluids
• [111]-strained spin ice: Localization of thermodynamically deconfined monopoles
• Power spectrum of magnetic relaxation in spin ice: anomalous diffusion in a Coulomb fluid
• Dynamic scaling near the Kasteleyn transition in spin ice: critical relaxation of monopoles and strings following a field quench
• Hearing the light: stray-field noise from the emergent photon in quantum spin ice