Udagawa Masafumi

We study the interplay of topological bottlenecks and energetic barriers to<br /> equilibration in a Coulomb spin liquid where a short-range energetic coupling<br /> between defects charged under an emergent gauge field supplements their<br /> entropic long-range Coulomb interaction. This work is motivated by the<br /> prevalence of memory effects observed across a wide range of geometrically<br /> frustrated magnetic materials, possibly including the spontaneous Hall effect<br /> observed in Pr2Ir2O7. Our model is canonical spin-ice model on the pyrochlore<br /> lattice, where farther-neighbour spin couplings give rise to a nearest-neighbor<br /> interaction between topological defects which can easily be chosen to be<br /> unnatural or not, i.e. attractive or repulsive between defects of equal gauge<br /> charge. Among the novel features of this model are the following. After<br /> applying a field quench, a rich dynamical approach to equilibrium emerges,<br /> dominated by multi-scale energy barriers responsible for long-lived<br /> magnetization plateaux. These even allow for the metastability of a<br /> &quot;fragmented&quot; spin liquid, an elusive regime where partial order co-exists with<br /> a spin liquid. Perhaps most strikingly, the attraction produces clusters of<br /> defects whose stability is due to a combination of energetic barriers for their<br /> break-up and proximity of opposite charges along with an entropic barrier<br /> generated by the topological requirement of annihilating a defect only together<br /> with an oppositely charged counterpart. These clusters may take the form of a<br /> &quot;jellyfish&quot; spin texture, comprising an arrangement of same-sign gauge-charges,<br /> centered on a hexagonal ring with branches of arbitrary length. The ring<br /> carries a clockwise or counterclockwise circular flow of magnetisation. This<br /> emergent toroidal degrees of freedom provides a possibility for time reversal<br /> symmetry breaking with possible relevance to the spontaneous Hall effect<br /> observed in Pr2Ir2O7.