Abstract
The origin and nature of glassy dynamics presents one of the central enigmas of condensed-matter physics across a broad range of systems ranging from window glass to spin glasses. The spin-ice compound Dy2Ti2O7, which is perhaps best known as hosting a three-dimensional Coulomb spin liquid with magnetically charged monopole excitations, also falls out of equilibrium at low temperature. How and why it does so remains an open question. Based on an analysis of low-temperature diffuse neutron-scattering experiments employing different cooling protocols alongside recent magnetic noise studies, combined with extensive numerical modeling, we argue that upon cooling, the spins freeze into what may be termed a "structural magnetic glass,"without an a priori need for chemical or structural disorder. Specifically, our model indicates the presence of frustration on two levels, first producing a near-degenerate constrained manifold inside which phase ordering kinetics is in turn frustrated. A remarkable feature is that monopoles act as sole annealers of the spin network and their pathways and history encode the development of glass dynamics, allowing the glass formation to be visualized. Our results suggest that spin ice Dy2Ti2O7 provides one prototype of magnetic glass formation specifically and a setting for the study of kinetically constrained systems more generally.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 033159 |
| Journal | Physical Review Research |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2022 |
Funding
D.A.T. and A.M.S. would like to thank Cristian Batista and Erica Carlson for useful discussions. Funding: Z.L.D. and H.D.Z. thank the NSF for support with Grant No. DMR-2003117. A portion of this research used resources at Spallation Neutron Source and was supported by DOE BES User Facilities. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Science Center. Support for Q.Z. was provided by US DOE under EPSCoR Grant No. DESC0012432 with additional support from the Louisiana Board of Regents. The computer modeling used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. S.A.G. thanks Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica through PICT 2017-2347. This work was partly supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Grant No. SFB 1143 (Project ID No. 247310070) and the cluster of excellence ct.qmat (EXC 2147, Project ID No. 390858490), by the Helmholtz Virtual Institute, “New States of Matter and their Excitations,” and by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through Grants No. EP/K028960/1, No. EP/P034616/1, and No. EP/T028580/1 (C.C.). Part of this work was carried out within the framework of a Max-Planck independent research group on strongly correlated systems. T.E. was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. B97354X20, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences, and Engineering Division.