Skyrmion lattice with a giant topological Hall effect in a frustrated triangular-lattice magnet

By T. Kurumaji, T. Nakajima, M. Hirschberger, A. Kikkawa, Y. Yamasaki, H. Sagayama, H. Nakao, Y. Taguchi, T. Arima, Y. Tokura. Science, 2018

690 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Skyrmions in a frustrated magnet Skyrmions—tiny, topologically protected whirlpools of spin—have been investigated as potential information carriers in spintronic devices. Usually, skyrmions appear in noncentrosymmetric materials or at interfaces between materials. In contrast to this rule of thumb, Kurumaji et al. observed a skyrmion lattice phase in the centrosymmetric material Gd2PdSi3. The magnetic frustration present in this material helped stabilize the skyrmion phase, which was detected through transport measurements in magnetic field. Science, this issue p. 914 A skyrmion phase is detected in the centrosymmetric material Gd2PdSi3 through magnetotransport. Geometrically frustrated magnets can host complex spin textures, leading to unconventional electromagnetic responses. Magnetic frustration may also promote topologically nontrivial spin states such as magnetic skyrmions. Experimentally, however, skyrmions have largely been observed in noncentrosymmetric lattice structures or interfacial symmetry-breaking heterostructures. Here, we report the emergence of a Bloch-type skyrmion state in the frustrated centrosymmetric triangular-lattice magnet Gd2PdSi3. We observed a giant topological Hall response, indicating a field-induced skyrmion phase, which is further corroborated by the observation of in-plane spin modulation probed by resonant x-ray scattering. Our results may lead to further discoveries of emergent electrodynamics in magnetically frustrated centrosymmetric materials.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/95230f52dfc6a6c99baf2a07eba766c8e0781a51

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Weisheng Zhao
2. Xichao Zhang
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4. Yan Zhou

In Materials Chemistry

1. M. Ezawa
2. O. Yazyev

Citations in the corpus

• Skyrmion-electronics: writing, deleting, reading and processing magnetic skyrmions toward spintronic applications (2019, background): “In 2019, Kurumaji et al [304] experimentally found a Bloch-type skyrmion state in a frustrated centrosymmetric triangular-lattice magnet Gd2PdSi3, where a giant topological Hall response is observed, indicating the field-induced skyrmion phase.”