Quenched Dynamics of Artificial Spin Ice: Coarsening versus Kibble-Zurek

Abstract

Artificial spin ices are ideal frustrated model systems in which to explore or design emergent phenomena with unprecedented characterization of the constituent degrees of freedom. In square spin ice, violations of the ice rule are topological excitations essential to the kinetics of the system, providing an ideal testbed for studying the dynamics of such defects under varied quench rates. In this work we describe the first test of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism and critical coarsening in colloidal square and colloidal hexagonal ice under quenches from a weakly interacting liquid state into a strongly interacting regime. As expected, for infinitely slow quenches, the system is defect free, while for increasing quench rate, an increasing number of defects remain in the sample. For square ice, we find regimes in which the defect population decreases as a power law with decreasing quench rate. A detailed scaling analysis shows that for a wide range of parameters, including quench rates that are accessible by experiments, the behavior is described by critical coarsening rather than by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, since the defect-defect interactions are long ranged. For quenches closer to the critical point, however, there can be a competition between the two mechanisms.

7 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Tension-free Dirac strings and steered magnetic charges in 3D artificial spin ice
• Violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem and effective temperatures in spin ice
• The Kibble-Zurek Scenario and Coarsening Across Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in Driven Vortices and Skyrmions
• Universal Critical Holography and Domain Wall Formation
• Annealing Dynamics of Regular Rotor Networks: Universality and Its Breakdown
• Deconstructing symmetry breaking dynamics
• Nonequilibrium generation of charge defects in kagome spin ice under slow cooling
• Dynamic scaling theory for a field quench near the Kasteleyn transition in spin ice
• Dynamics of the order parameter in symmetry breaking phase transitions
• Dynamic scaling near the Kasteleyn transition in spin ice: critical relaxation of monopoles and strings following a field quench