Experimental Studies of Artificial Spin Ice

Methods for detecting order-by-disorder transitions: the example of the Domino model

“…Since the crossover or transition temperatures can be tuned at will, our procedure allows one to probe the ObD mechanism without going to too-low temperature, where other kinds of energetic contributions might interfere with it. In conclusion, we think that these methods should be useful for checking whether a system exhibits the ObD transition; for instance, in artificial spin-ice settings [10][11][12], in which the interactions and the disorder might be engineered at will.…”

“…Detecting the ObD transition is also a hard task numerically, due to the fact that at low temperatures the equilibration time of frustrated spin systems becomes, in general, very long. The aim of this paper is to propose a way to probe the ObD transition in an indirect way which might be implemented in the laboratory, for instance, in artificial spin-ice settings [10][11][12]. The idea, as we explain in the main part of the article, is to use external magnetic fields to transform the zero-temperature transition into a finitetemperature sharp crossover, or maybe even a veritable phase transition, and then detect the latter with the usual methods.…”