Speaker
Dr
Elena Mengotti
(Laboratory for Micro and Nanotechnology, SYN department, Paul Scherrer Institut, 5232 Villigen-PSI. Switzerland)
Description
Arrays of dipolar coupled ferromagnetic islands, arranged in specific geometries, provide an ideal tool to directly study the behavior of frustrated systems mimicking those found in Nature. In this presentation, single domain ferromagnetic islands arranged in the two dimensional kagome spin-ice geometry have been fabricated with electron beam lithography and the magnetic configurations have been imaged employing x-ray magnetic circular dichroism in a photoemission electron microscope.
This study begins with a bottom-up approach, starting with the three basic building blocks of the artificial kagome spin-ice consisting of one, two, and three rings. Here the energy characterization is presented together with results achieved after using a demagnetization procedure. After setting the baseline with the building block structures, the magnetization reversal processes in the infinite kagome spin-ice array were studied with a magnetic charge model. It is shown that magnetization reversal proceeds through the nucleation and avalanche-type dissociation of emergent monopole- antimonopole pairs along one dimensional Dirac strings.
Please specify the session
Plenary session
Please specify poster or talk
Talk
Primary author
Dr
Elena Mengotti
(Laboratory for Micro and Nanotechnology, SYN department, Paul Scherrer Institut, 5232 Villigen-PSI. Switzerland)
