Periodic striped states in Ising models with dipolar interactions

We review the problem of determining the ground states of 2D Ising models with nearest neighbor ferromagnetic and dipolar interactions, and prove a new result supporting the conjecture that, if the nearest neighbor coupling $J$ is sufficiently large, the ground states are periodic and `striped'. More precisely, we prove a restricted version of the conjecture, by constructing the minimizers within the variational class of states whose domain walls are arbitrary collections of horizontal and/or vertical straight lines.