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.

Low-energy states, ground states, and variable frustrations of the finite-size dipolar Cairo lattices.

To investigate the influence of geometric frustration on the properties of low-energy configurations of systems of ferromagnetic nanoislands located on the edges of the Cairo lattice, the model of interacting Ising-like magnetic dipoles is used. By the method of complete enumeration, the densities of states of the Cairo pentagonal lattices of a finite number of Ising-like point dipoles are calculated. The calculated ground and low-energy states for systems with a small number of dipoles can be used to solve the problem of searching for the ground states in a system with a relatively large number of dipoles. It is shown that the ground-state energy of the Cairo pentagonal lattices exhibits nonmonotonic behavior on one of the lattice parameters. The lattice parameters can be used to control the degree of geometric frustration. For the studied lattices of a finite number of Ising dipoles on the Cairo lattice in the ground-state configurations, a number of closed pentagons is observed, which are different from the obtained maximum closed pentagons. The magnetic order in the ground-state configurations obeys the ice rule and the quasi-ice rules.