Hydrodynamic Memory and Long-Time Tails in Clean Frustrated Magnets

In a simple, clean but constrained magnet, we identify a self-interacting random walk with memory. For the motion of a single monopole – a fractionalized quasiparticle in spin ice – this produces a subtle and unusually slow relaxation toward diffusive motion. This is manifested as an algebraic long-time tail in the velocity autocorrelation function, decaying as $t^{-3\mathrm{/}2}$. At finite monopole density, the interactions between the trails of different monopoles introduce an additional timescale, corresponding to the disruption of a monopole’s memory by other monopoles, and leading to an exponential cutoff of the long-time tail. Our results identify clean frustrated magnets as microscopic platforms for studying self-interacting stochastic processes, hydrodynamic memory, and the emergence of non-Markovian quasiparticle transport from local Markovian dynamics.