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  • Open Access

Emergent magnetic monopole in artificial polariton spin ice

Junhui Cao1,* and Alexey Kavokin1,2,3,4,†

  • *Contact author: tsao.c@mipt.ru
  • †Contact author: a.kavokin@westlake.edu.cn
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APS Open Sci. 1, 000097 – Published 18 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rk2y-2q9j

Abstract

Artificial spin ice provides a versatile setting for emergent gauge fields and magnetic monopole excitations. Here, we propose a driven-dissipative polariton realization of artificial spin ice, in which the circular polarization of each link mode plays the role of an Ising degree of freedom, while an auxiliary lossy vertex mode dynamically enforces a local ice-rule constraint. Adiabatic elimination of the vertex mode yields an effective spin ice penalty, favoring the two-in two-out manifold in the steady state. We show that local polarization flips generate monopole-antimonopole defects, and that sequential flips transport these defects across the lattice while defining a Dirac string. In an extended spin ice geometry, the vertex charges and their dynamics can be directly reconstructed from polarization-resolved real-space imaging. Our results establish polariton lattices as a controllable driven-dissipative platform in which local ice-rule constraints and monopolelike vertex defects can be generated, manipulated, and reconstructed through polarization-resolved optical measurements.

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APS Open Sci. 1, 000097– Published 18 August, 2026
Vol. 1
  • Received 30 March 2026
  • Accepted 5 August 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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