Order and disorder, crossovers, and phase transitions in dipolar artificial spin ice on the Cairo lattice

We study the thermodynamic properties of the magnetic dipolar spin ice on a 2D pentagonal Cairo lattice by using the numerical Metropolis and the complete enumeration methods. We use the model of point Ising-like dipoles considering long-range interactions with up to 100 nearest neighbors and with periodic boundary conditions. There are two explicit peaks both in the temperature behavior of the heat capacity and in the magnetic susceptibility. The low-temperature peak is caused only by long-range interactions and is not present in the model where each dipole interacts only with four nearest neighbors. The height of the peak depends logarithmically on the quantity of dipoles, which indicates a phase transition. The nature of the low-temperature phase transition is related to the transformation from order to disorder in orthogonal sublattices while maintaining the spin ice state and the spin ice rule in the sublattice of crosses. The high-temperature heat capacity peak is associated with the melting of spin ice, i.e., with the crossover from spin ice to paramagnetic chaos. Its height is constant and does not depend on the quantity of dipoles. It is shown that the choice of the radius of the dipole-dipole interaction has a significant effect on the statistical properties of the model. The model may even show the appearance of the long-range order and the phase transition in the case of long-range interaction or its absence in the case of short-range interaction.

Automated summary

We investigated the thermodynamic properties of magnetic dipolar spin ice on a 2D pentagonal Cairo lattice. We found two explicit temperature peaks, where the low-temperature peak is caused by long-range interactions and the high-temperature peak is associated with the melting of spin ice. The choice of the dipole-dipole interaction radius significantly affects the statistical properties of the model.