Science Daily  April 2, 2018 In artificial spin ice, which in certain phases appears disordered, the material is ordered, but in a “topological” form. A team of researchers in the US (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Minnesota, Yale University) explored a particular artificial spin ice geometry, called Shakti spin ice which could reach its low-energy state as temperature was reduced in successive quenches. Shakti spin ice stubbornly remained at about the same energy level that could be mapped exactly into the “dimer cover model,” whose […]