Institut Charles Sadron Event

Frustration has become a ubiquitous explanation for long-standing problems in soft matter systems, from glassy behaviors to protein folding. It is also present in solid-state materials such as water ice or rare earth magnets, and it’s of technological importance for information storage in traditional magnetic recording devices. Artificial Ice systems have been widely used to explore frustration, producing exciting results such as logic devices, information storage, glassy dynamics, and domain formation. But artificial ice systems are 2D which costs us either the degeneracy, in the case of square ice, or vertex neutrality in the case of the honeycomb spin ice. That is why the recovery of degeneracy in square lattices is a long-standing challenge in the artificial spin ice community. We combine experiments, theory, and Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that, applying a shear transformation to the square lattice recovers partially the ground-state degeneracy, maintaining the charge neutrality of the vertices. Our method opens an avenue to engineer a novel class of frustrated micro- and nano-structures based on sheared magnetic lattices in a wide range of soft- and condensed-matter systems.