Melting artificial spin ice

Artificial spin ice arrays of micromagnetic islands are a means of engineering additional energy scales and frustration into magnetic materials. Here we demonstrate a magnetic phase transition in an artificial square spin ice and use the symmetry of the lattice to verify the presence of excitations far below the ordering temperature. We do this by measuring the temperature-dependent magnetization in different principal directions and comparing it with simulations of idealized statistical mechanical models. Our results confirm a dynamical pre-melting of the artificial spin ice structure at a temperature well below the intrinsic ordering temperature of the island material. We thus create a spin ice array that has the real thermal dynamics of artificial spins over an extended temperature range.