Emergent magnetic monopoles, disorder, and avalanches in artificial kagome spin ice (invited)

We study artificial spin ice with isolated elongated nanoscale islands arranged in a kagome lattice and solely interacting via long range dipolar fields. The artificial kagome spin ice displays a phenomenology similar to the microscopic pyrochlore system, where excitations at sub-Kelvin temperatures consist of emergent monopole quasiparticles that are connected via a solenoidal flux line, a classical and observable version of the Dirac string. We show that magnetization reversal in kagome spin ice is fundamentally different from the nucleation and extensive domain growth scenario expected for a generic 2D system. Here, the magnetization reverses in a strictly 1D fashion: After nucleation, a monopole-antimonopole dissociates along a 1D path, leaving a (Dirac) string of islands with reversed magnetization in its wake. Since the 2D artificial spin ice spontaneously decays into a 1D subsystem, magnetization reversal in kagome spin ice provides an example of dimensional reduction via frustration. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3670441]