  In a two-dimensional arrangement of closely spaced elliptical nanomagnets
with in-plane magnetic anisotropy, whose major axes are aligned along columns
and minor axes along rows, dipole coupling will make the magnetic ordering
"ferromagnetic" along the columns and "anti-ferromagnetic" along the rows.
Noise and other perturbations can drive the system out of this ground state
configuration and pin it in a metastable state where the magnetization
orientations will not follow this pattern. Internal energy barriers,
sufficiently larger than the thermal energy kT, will prevent the system from
leaving the metastable state and decaying spontaneously to the ground state.
These barriers can be temporarily eroded by globally straining the nanomagnets
with time-varying strain if the nanomagnets are magnetostrictive, which will
allow the system to return to ground state after strain is removed. This is a
hardware emulation of simulated annealing in an interacting many body system.
Here, we demonstrate this function experimentally.
