Topological Boundary Constrais in Artificial Colloidal Ice*

Recently, the research of collective phenomena has begun to exploit the new advances in micro and nanoscience to tailor and design systems with desired properties, often more fertile than their “natural” counterparts. I will show our latest work on an Artificial Colloidal Ice system, where, using Brownian Dynamic simulations and “proof of concept” experiments, we study the effect of boundaries in a geometrically frustrated system and how they can be used to influence the bulk behavior.

We demonstrate that an antiferromagnetic border drives the system fast to the ground state (GS) when compared with the commonly implemented periodic boundary conditions. We also show that combinations of the defects’ position at the boundaries generate emergent phenomena such as symmetry breaking or topologically protected strings. Far from being exhaustive, our work opens the doors of a playground where boundary conditions may be engineered to access desired states or new phenomenology.