Artificial spin ices are engineered arrays of dipolarly coupled nanobar magnets. They enable direct investigations of fascinating collective phenomena from their diverse microstates. However, experimental access to ground states in the geometrically frustrated systems has proven difficult, limiting studies and applications of novel properties and functionalities from the low energy states. Here, we introduce a convenient approach to control the competing diploar interactions between the neighboring nanomagnets, allowing us to tailor the vertex degeneracy of the ground states. We achieve this by tuning the length of selected nanobar magnets in the spin ice lattice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by realizing multiple low energy microstates in a Kagome artificial spin ice, particularly the hardly accessible long range ordered ground state - the spin crystal state. Our strategy can be directly applied to other artificial spin systems to achieve exotic phases and explore new emergent collective behaviors.
@article{arxiv.2207.06619,
title = {Crystallizing Kagome artificial spin ice},
author = {Wen-Cheng Yue and Zixiong Yuan and Yang-Yang Lyu and Sining Dong and Jian Zhou and Zhi-Li Xiao and Liang He and Xuecou Tu and Ying Dong and Huabing Wang and Weiwei Xu and Lin Kang and Peiheng Wu and Cristiano Nisoli and Wai-Kwong Kwok and Yong-Lei Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.06619},
year = {2022}
}