Dynamical fractal and anomalous noise in a clean magnetic crystal

Abstract

Fractals—objects with noninteger dimensions—occur in manifold settings and length scales in nature. In this work, we identify an emergent dynamical fractal in a disorder-free, stoichiometric, and three-dimensional magnetic crystal in thermodynamic equilibrium. The phenomenon is born from constraints on the dynamics of the magnetic monopole excitations in spin ice, which restrict them to move on the fractal. This observation explains the anomalous exponent found in magnetic noise experiments in the spin ice compound Dy2Ti2O7, and it resolves a long-standing puzzle about its rapidly diverging relaxation time. The capacity of spin ice to exhibit such notable phenomena suggests that there will be further unexpected discoveries in the cooperative dynamics of even simple topological many-body systems.