Fractal deconfinement and confinement in Sierpinski ice

Abstract

We study the six-vertex model on the Sierpinski gasket, a four-coordinated hierarchical fractal with Hausdorff dimension $d_f=\log_23$. Given the importance of dimensionality for the long-wavelength behavior of such models, we specifically consider correlations and confinement as a function of the vertex weights, with the equal-weight point corresponding to the ice model. We calculate the partition function and correlators recursively to obtain a rich phase diagram hosting many different regimes. While the ice model shows entropic charge confinement, a particular four-vertex limit exhibits fractal deconfinement, with the string joining the deconfined charges itself a statistical fractal with fractal dimension $d_l=\log_2(5/2)\approx 1.3$. Finally, we propose a setup as an artificial spin ice to enable experimental study of the rich phenomenology of Sierpinski ice and its generalisations.