Transport, hysteresis and avalanches in artificial spin ice systems

We examine the hopping dynamics of an artificial spin ice system constructed from colloids on a kagome optical trap array where each trap has two possible states. By applying an external drive from an electric field which is analogous to a biasing applied magnetic field for real spin systems, we can create polarized states that obey the spin-ice rules of two spins in and one spin out at each vertex. We demonstrate that when we sweep the external drive and measure the fraction of the system that has been polarized, we can generate a hysteresis loop analogous to the hysteretic magnetization versus external magnetic field curves for real spin systems. The disorder in our system can be readily controlled by changing the barrier that must be overcome before a colloid can hop from one side of a trap to the other. For systems with no disorder, the effective spins all flip simultaneously as the biasing field is changed, while for strong disorder the hysteresis curves show a series of discontinuous jumps or avalanches similar to Barkhausen noise.