Avalanches and disorder-induced criticality in artificial spin ices

We show that both square and kagome artificial spin ice systems exhibit disorder-induced nonequilibrium phase transitions, with power law avalanche distributions at the critical disorder level. The different nature of geometrical frustration in the two lattices produces distinct types of critical avalanche behavior. For the square ice, the avalanches involve the propagation of locally stable domain walls separating the two polarized ground states, and the scaling collapse agrees with an interface depinning mechanism. In contrast, avalanches in the fully frustrated kagome ice exhibit pronounced branching behaviors that resemble those found in directed percolation. The kagome ice also shows an interesting crossover in the power-law scaling of the avalanches at low disorder. Our results show that artificial spin ices are ideal systems in which to study nonequilibrium critical point phenomena.