We report a study of the low temperature bulk magnetic properties of the spin ice compound Dy 2 Ti 2 O 7 with particular attention to the (TϽ4 K) spin freezing transition. While this transition is superficially similar to that in a spin glass, there are important qualitative differences from spin glass behavior: the freezing temperature increases slightly with applied magnetic field, and the distribution of spin relaxation times remains extremely narrow down to the lowest temperatures. Furthermore, the characteristic spin relaxation time increases faster than exponentially down to the lowest temperatures studied. These results indicate that spin-freezing in spin ice materials represents a novel form of magnetic glassiness associated with the unusual nature of geometrical frustration in these materials.

The large degeneracy of states resulting from the geometrical frustration of competing interactions is an essential ingredient of important problems in fields as diverse as magnetism, protein folding and neural networks. As first explained by Pauling, geometrical frustration of proton positions is also responsible for the unusual low-temperature thermodynamics of ice and its measured 'ground state' entropy. Recent work has shown that the geometrical frustration of ice is mimicked by Dy2Ti2O7, a site-ordered magnetic material in which the spins reside on a lattice of corner-sharing tetrahedra where they form an unusual magnetic ground state known as 'spin ice'. Here we identify a cooperative spin-freezing transition leading to the spin-ice ground state in Dy2Ti2O7. This transition is associated with a very narrow range of relaxation times, and represents a new form of spin-freezing. The dynamics are analogous to those associated with the freezing of protons in ice, and they provide a means through which to study glass-like behaviour and the consequences of frustration in the limit of low disorder.

Single-crystal superconducting tin nanowires with diameters of 40–160 nm have been prepared by electrochemical deposition in porous polycarbonate membranes. Structural characterization through transmission electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction showed that the nanowires are highly oriented along the [100] direction. Although the superconducting transition temperature is close to the bulk value of 3.7 K, the effect of reduced dimensionality is clearly evident in the electrical transport properties of the thinnest wires (40 nm diameter). Magnetization measurements show that the critical field of the nanowires increases significantly with decreasing diameter to ∼0.3 T for the thinnest wires, nearly an order of magnitude larger than the bulk value.