  "Spin Ice" is an exotic type of frustrated magnet realized in "pyrochlore"
materials Ho_{2}Ti_{2}O_{7}, Dy_{2}Ti_{2}O_{7}, Ho_{2}Sn_{2}O_{7}, etc., in
which magnetic atoms (spins) reside on a sublattice made of the vertices of
corner-sharing tetrahedra. Each spin is Ising-like with respect to a local axis
which connects the centers of two tetrahedra sharing the vertex occupied by the
spin. The macroscopically degenerate ground states of these magnets obey the
"two-in two-out" "ice rule" within each tetrahedron. Magnetic monopoles and
anti-monopoles emerge as elementary excitations, "fractionalizing" the
constituent magnetic dipoles. This system is also a novel type of statistical
mechanical system. Here we introduce a conceptual generalization of "spin ice"
to what we shall call "color-tripole ice", in which three types of "color
charges" can emerge as elementary excitations, which are Abelian approximations
of the color charges introduced in high energy physics. Two two-dimensional
(2D) models are introduced first, where the color charges are found to be 1D
and constrained 2D, respectively. Generalizations of these two models to 3D are
then briefly discussed, In the second one the color charges are likely 3D.
Pauling-type estimates of the "residual (or zero-point) entropy" are also made
for these models.
