Spin ices are insulating magnetic pyrochlore materials subject to high geometrical frustration leading to fascinating physics such as a low-temperature state with extensive entropy, algebraic correlations away from criticality, and point-like gapped excitations taking the form of deconfined charges. Spin ice constitutes a paradigmatic example of a strongly correlated (classical) spin liquid described by an emergent gauge theory. Given how important boundary conditions play on the physics of the best understood gauge theory we know, that of electromagnetism, it is perhaps natural to ask what happens to the physics of spin ice systems in a confined thin film geometry or what are the properties of the free surface of single crystals of spin ice materials. In this talk, I will review experimental results on spin ice thin films and discuss our recent theoretical investigations [1,2] of two minimal models of such systems.
[1] L. D. C. Jaubert, T. Lin, T. S. Opel, P. C.W. Holdsworth, and M. J. P. Gingras,
“Spin ice Thin Film: Surface Ordering, Emergent Square ice, and Strain Effects”,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 207206 (2017).
[2] E. Lantagne-Hurtubise, J.G. Rau, and M.J.P. Gingras,
“Spin ice thin films: Large-N theory and Monte Carlo simulations”,
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Waterloo