Magnetism, Volume 4, Issue 2 (June 2024) – 2 articles

Inspired in pyrochlore materials presenting residual entropy and featuring collective excitation behaving like emergent monopoles, geometrically frustrated arrays of nanomagnets, denominated artificial spin ices (ASIs), were proposed as an interesting platform to investigate such excitation at room temperature. However, in such artificial systems, emergent magnetic monopoles lack the same freedom present their natural counterpart, once energetic strings connecting opposite magnetic charges arise. In this work, we aim to experimentally investigate the proposed degeneracy obtained in connected square arrays of ASIs, a characteristic that allows a reduction in the string connecting monopole–antimonopole pairs in regular non-connected ASIs and could represent an important development for technological applications of connected nanomagnets. As in general those systems are developed by nanofabrication processes involving expensive and time-consuming physical vapour deposition techniques, we also present a new nanofabrication route using an electrodeposition technique for permalloy growth in different lattice geometries as an alternative for fast and low-cost ASI system production. Full article

The structure of skyrmion and spiral solutions, investigated within the phenomenological Dzyaloshinskii model of chiral magnets near the ordering temperatures, is characterized by the strong interplay between longitudinal and angular order parameters, which may be responsible for experimentally observed precursor effects. Within the precursor regions, additional effects, such as pressure, electric fields, chemical doping, uniaxial strains and/or magnetocrystalline anisotropies, modify the energetic landscape and may even lead to the stability of such exotic phases as a square staggered lattice of half-skyrmions, the internal structure of which employs the concept of the “soft” modulus and contains points with zero modulus value. Here, we additionally alter the stiffness of the magnetization modulus to favor one- and two-dimensional modulated states with large modulations of the order parameter magnitude. The computed phase diagram, which omits any additional effects, exhibits stability pockets with a square half-skyrmion lattice, a hexagonal skyrmion lattice with the magnetization in the center of the cells parallel to the applied magnetic field, and helicoids with propagation transverse to the field, i.e., those phases in which the notion of localized defects is replaced by the picture of a smooth but more complex tiling of space. We note that the results can be adapted to metallic glasses, in which the energy contributions are the same and originate from the inherent frustration in the models, and chiral liquid crystals with a different ratio of elastic constants. Full article