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Magnetic monopoles

Entropy lost

Nature Physics volume 9, pages 326–327 (2013)Cite this article

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Low-temperature experiments on spin ice indicate that entropy plateaus at a value close to that estimated for water ice — a result at odds with the third law of thermodynamics. New measurements below 500 mK are consistent with the idea that spin ice finds a way to lose this residual entropy.

In many ways, life gets simpler as things get colder. Atoms slow down, magnetic ions order and entropy slowly leaks away until, at absolute zero, none remains. But the spin-ice materials Ho2Ti2O7 and Dy2Ti2O7 seem to buck this trend — neither system has ever been seen to order at any temperature. Instead, at the lowest temperatures measured, each magnetic ion retains a finite residual entropy, close to the s ≈ kB/2 ln(3/2) predicted for water ice1. Now, writing in Nature Physics, David Pomaranski and co-authors describe new experiments on Dy2Ti2O7, which bring us one step closer to solving this mystery2.

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Change history

  • 16 May 2013

    In the News and Views 'Entropy lost' originally published online, the surname of the first author of ref. 2 was misspelt in some places, it should have read Pomaranski. Corrected in all versions.

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  1. Nic Shannon is at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Tancha 1919-1 Onna-son, Okinawa 904-0412, Japan,

    Nic Shannon

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  1. Nic Shannon
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Correspondence to Nic Shannon.

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Shannon, N. Entropy lost. Nature Phys 9, 326–327 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2611

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