[111]-strained spin ice: Localization of thermodynamically deconfined monopoles

Abstract

We study classical spin ice under uniaxial strain along the $[111]$ crystallographic axis. Remarkably, such strain preserves the extensive ice degeneracy and the corresponding classical Coulomb phase. The emergent monopole excitations remain thermodynamically deconfined exactly as in the isotropic case. However, their motion under local heat bath dynamics depends qualitatively on the sign of the strain. In the low-temperature limit for negative strain, the monopoles diffuse, while for positive strain, they localize. Introducing additional ring exchange dynamics into the ice background transforms the localized monopoles into sub-dimensional excitations whose motion is restricted to diffusion in the $(111)$-plane. The phenomena we identify are experimentally accessible in rare-earth pyrochlores under uniaxial pressure as well as in tripod kagome materials. The diffusive versus localized nature of the monopoles manifests in characteristic magnetic noise spectra, which we compute.

17 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Pyrochlore Photons: The U(1) Spin Liquid in a S=1/2 Three-Dimensional Frustrated Magnet
• Dirac Strings and Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice Dy2Ti2O7
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• Dynamical fractal and anomalous noise in a clean magnetic crystal
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• Thermodynamics of the Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the maple-leaf lattice
• Random Transverse Field Effects on Magnetic Noise in Spin Systems
• Hearing the light: stray-field noise from the emergent photon in quantum spin ice
• Enhanced-Entropy Phases in Geometrically Frustrated Pyrochlore Magnets
• Anisotropic Spin Ice on a Breathing Pyrochlore Lattice