Single-ion anisotropy and magnetic field response in spin ice materials Ho₂Ti₂O₇ and Dy₂Ti₂O₇

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Motivated by its role as a central pillar of current theories of dynamics of spin ice in and out of equilibrium, we study the single-ion dynamics of the magnetic rare earth ions in their local environments, subject to the effective fields set up by the magnetic moments they interact with. This effective field has a transverse component with respect to the local easy-axis of the crystal electric field, which can induce quantum tunnelling. We go beyond the projective spin-1/2 picture and use instead the full crystal-field Hamiltonian. We find that the Kramers vs non-Kramers nature, as well as the symmetries of the crystal-field Hamiltonian, result in different perturbative behaviour at small fields (1 T), with transverse field effects being more pronounced in Ho₂Ti₂O₇ than in Dy₂Ti₂O₇. Remarkably, the energy splitting range we find is consistent with time scales extracted from experiments. We also present a study of the static magnetic response which highlights the anisotropy of the system in the form of an off-diagonal g tensor and we investigate the effects of thermal fluctuations in the temperature regime of relevance to experiments. We show that there is a narrow yet accessible window of experimental parameters where the anisotropic response can be observed.