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. 2018 Mar 19;8:4750. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-23208-6

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Artificial spin ice configurations and annealing. (a) The 16 different possible vertex configurations grouped by increasing energy from Type 1, 2, 3 and 4 with degeneracies 2, 4, 8 and 2, respectively. (b) (top) The direction of the applied field in order to prepare the initial T₂ saturated state. (bottom) An example of an anneal process carried out where the target temperature was T = 513 K. The heating was done over a 120 s period, the sample was held at the target temperature for 180 s and the cooling duration was 3 minutes, where the initial cooling took place more rapidly, indicated by the dotted line. (c) An example raw atomic force microscopy (AFM) image showing the topography, the raw magnetic force microscopy (MFM) image showing the magnetic contrast and the resulting vertex map. (d) The detailed key showing the schematic of a vertex (only one degenerate state is shown for simplification) with the corresponding MFM contrast and the symbol then used in converting to the vertex maps.