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Experimental Studies of Artificial Spin Ice

Artificial spin ices were originally introduced as analogs of the pyrochlore spin ices, but have since become a much richer field . The original attraction of building nanotechnological analogs of the pyrochlores were threefold: to allow room temperature studies of geometrical frustration; to provide model statistical mechanical systems where all the relevant parameters in an experiment can be tuned by design; and to be able to examine the exact microstate of those systems using advanced magnetic microscopy methods. From this beginning the field has grown to encompass studies of the effects of quenched disorder, thermally activated dynamics, microwave frequency responses, magnetotransport properties, and the development of lattice geometries--with related emergent physics---that have no analog in naturally-occurring crystalline systems. The field also offers the prospect of contributing to novel magnetic logic devices, since the arrays of nanoislands that form artificial spin ices are similar in many respects to those that are used in the development of magnetic quantum cellular automata. In this chapter, I review the experimental aspects of this story, complementing the theoretical chapter by Gia-Wei Chern.