Reconfigurable Pinwheel Artificial-Spin-Ice and Superconductor Hybrid Device

The ability to control the potential landscape in a medium of interacting particles could lead to intriguing collective behavior and innovative functionalities. Here, we utilize spatially reconfigurable magnetic potentials of a pinwheel artificial spin ice structure to tailor the motion of superconducting vortices. The reconstituted chain structures of the magnetic charges in the artificial pinwheel spin ice and the strong interaction between magnetic charges and superconducting vortices allow significant modification of the transport properties of the underlying superconducting thin film, resulting in a reprogrammable resistance state that enables a reversible and switchable vortex Hall effect. Our results highlight an effective and simple method of using artificial spin ice as an in-situ reconfigurable nanoscale energy landscape to design reprogrammable superconducting electronics, which could also be applied to the in-situ control of properties and functionalities in other magnetic particle systems, such as magnetic skyrmions.
Comment: To appear in Nano Letters