Emergent snake magnetic domains in canted kagome ice

Abstract

We study the two-dimensional kagome-ice model derived from a pyrochlore lattice with second- and third-neighbor interactions. The canted moments align along the local (111) axes of the pyrochlore and respond to both in-plane and out-of-plane external fields. We find that the combination of further-neighbor interactions together with the external fields introduces a rich phase diagram with different spin textures. Close to the phase boundaries, metastable "snake"domains emerge with extremely long relaxation time. Our kinetic Monte Carlo analysis of the magnetic-field quench process from saturated state shows unusually slow dynamics. Although the interior spins are almost frozen in snake domains, the spins on the edge are free to fluctuate locally, leading to frequent creation and annihilation of monopole-antimonopole bound states. Once the domains are formed, these excitations are localized and can hardly propagate because of the energy barrier of snakes. The emergence of such snake domains may shed light on the experimental observation of dipolar spin ice under tilted fields and provide a new strategy to manipulate both spin and charge textures in artificial spin ice.