Chiral skyrmions in cubic helimagnet films: The role of uniaxial anisotropy
By M. Wilson, A. Butenko, A. Bogdanov, T. Monchesky. 2013
189 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper reports on magnetometry and magnetoresistance measurements of MnSi epilayers performed in out-of-plane magnetic fields. We present a theoretical analysis of the chiral modulations that arise in confined cubic helimagnets where the uniaxial anisotropy axis and magnetic field are both out-of-plane. In contrast to in-plane field measurements [Wilson et al., Phys. Rev. B 86, 144420 (2012)], the hard-axis uniaxial anisotropy in MnSi/Si(111) increases the energy of (111)-oriented skyrmions and in-plane helicoids relative to the cone phase, and it makes the cone phase the only stable magnetic texture below the saturation field. While induced uniaxial anisotropy is important in stabilizing skyrmion lattices and helicoids in other confined cubic helimagnets, the particular anisotropy in MnSi/Si(111) entirely suppresses these states in an out-of-plane magnetic field. However, it is predicted that isolated skyrmions with enlarged sizes exist in MnSi/Si(111) epilayers in a broad range of out-of-plane magnetic fields. These results reveal the importance of the symmetry of the anisotropies in bulk and confined cubic helimagnets in the formation of chiral modulations, and they provide additional evidence of the physical nature of the $A$-phase states in other B20 compounds.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/362c453fc4a762cb13be47c88f3974d964377dfa
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Citations in the corpus
- Observation of two independent skyrmion phases in a chiral magnetic material (2018, background): “Similarly, in thin films and tailored heterostructures, the formation of skyrmions is aided by the influence of surface energies [19].”
- Physical foundations and basic properties of magnetic skyrmions (2020, background): “These findings offer the conceptual and mathematical basis for theoretical investigations of complex magnetic phenomena in magnetic nanolayers [28-32, 34] and artificial magnetic multilayers with intrinsic, or induced Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (see e.”