Spin Ice is a problem in magnetism in which the anisotropy of dipole magnetic moments, and their interactions in certain solids, conspire with their local geometry to maintain a disordered state to low temperatures. It is analogous to the problem of proton disorder in water Ice - hence the name. The quantum version of this problem, Quantum Spin Ice (QSI), has been much studied for almost 20 years, as it would realize a quantum entangled ground state described by an emergent quantum electrodynamics. I'll describe the (mostly) experimental effort to identify such a QSI state in real solids, which features neutron spectroscopy covering over 4 orders of magnitude in energy. Interestingly, the most promising candidates are Ce-based pyrochlore magnets, which have S=1/2 degrees of freedom with both dipolar and octupolar character.
Not Your Father's (or Mother's!) Quantum Disordered Ground States: Dipoles and Octupoles in Quantum Spin Ice
Host: Young-June Kim