Spin-wave dynamics and symmetry breaking in an artificial spin ice

Abstract

Artificial spin ices are periodic arrangements of interacting nanomagnets successfully used to investigate emergent phenomena in the presence of geometric frustration. Recently, it has been shown that artificial spin ices can be used as building blocks for creating functional materials, such as magnonic crystals, and support a large number of programmable magnetic states. We investigate the magnetization dynamics in a system exhibiting anisotropic magnetostatic interactions owing to locally broken structural inversion symmetry. We find a rich spin-wave spectrum and investigate its evolution in an external magnetic field. We determine the evolution of individual modes, from building blocks up to larger arrays, highlighting the role of symmetry breaking in defining the mode profiles. Moreover, we demonstrate that the mode spectra exhibit signatures of long-range interactions in the system. These results contribute to the understanding of magnetization dynamics in spin ices beyond the kagome and square ice geometries and are relevant for the realization of reconfigurable magnonic crystals based on spin ices.

References in corpus (4)

• Artificial "spin ice" in a geometrically frustrated lattice of nanoscale ferromagnetic islands
• Spectral analysis of topological defects in an artificial spin-ice lattice
• Magnonics: Spin Waves Connecting Charges, Spins and Photons
• Dependence of energy barrier reduction on collective excitations in square artificial spin ice: A comprehensive comparison of simulation techniques