Artificial spin ice assisted creation and tuning of frustrated flux quanta
ORAL
Abstract
We report the controlling of geometric frustration in a novel hybrid system consisting of a reconfigurable artificial spin ice placed on top a superconducting thin film. The magnetic charge ground state of the artificial-spin-ice generates an ice-like “two attractive, two repulsive” pinning potential for the underlying flux-quanta in the superconducting film. This creates a 2D geometrically frustrated flux-quantum system which possesses extensive degeneracy. The geometric frustration in this flux-quantum system can be transformed in-situ into a variety of crystallized states with different symmetries. We achieved this by either changing the flux-quanta density with magnetic field or reconfiguring the magnetic charge ordering of the artificial-spin-ice. A tangible direct result of this study is a tunable superconducting critical current and a flux-quantum rectifier.
*This work was supported by the Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences which also funds Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) and Electron Microscopy Center (EMC) where the nano-patterning and morphological analysis were performed.
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Presenters
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Yong-Lei Wang
- Argonne National Lab., University of Notre Dame and Nanjing University
- Material Science Division, Argonne National Lab