Spontaneous skyrmion ground states in magnetic metals

By U. Rößler, A. Bogdanov, C. Pfleiderer. Nature, 2006

1,802 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the 1950s, Heisenberg and others have addressed the problem of how to explain the appearance of countable particles in continuous fields. Stable localized field configurations were searched for an ingredient for a general field theory of elementary particles, but the majority of nonlinear field models were unable to predict them. As an exception, Skyrme succeeded in describing nuclear particles as localized states, so-called ‘skyrmions’. Skyrmions are a characteristic of nonlinear continuum models ranging from microscopic to cosmological scales. Skyrmionic states have been found under non-equilibrium conditions, or when stabilized by external fields or the proliferation of topological defects. Examples are Turing patterns in classical liquids, spin textures in quantum Hall magnets, or the blue phases in liquid crystals. However, it has generally been assumed that skyrmions cannot form spontaneous ground states, such as ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic order, in magnetic materials. Here, we show theoretically that this assumption is wrong and that skyrmion textures may form spontaneously in condensed-matter systems with chiral interactions without the assistance of external fields or the proliferation of defects. We show this within a phenomenological continuum model based on a few material-specific parameters that can be determined experimentally. Our model has a condition not considered before: we allow for softened amplitude variations of the magnetization, characteristic of, for instance, metallic magnets. Our model implies that spontaneous skyrmion lattice ground states may exist generally in a large number of materials, notably at surfaces and in thin films, as well as in bulk compounds, where a lack of space inversion symmetry leads to chiral interactions.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computer Networks and Communications, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9f69fc1bccde4550f54a4e317daaa27b4d4c03e

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Citations in the corpus

Skyrmion-electronics: writing, deleting, reading and processing magnetic skyrmions toward spintronic applications (2019, background): “In 2006, Rößler and coworkers further theoretically demonstrated that skyrmion structures can be formed as spontaneous ground states in magnetic metals with DM interactions without the assistance of external fields or the proliferation of defects [20].”
Colloquium: Disclination loops, point defects, and all that in nematic liquid crystals (2012, neutral): “The texture arising on the island from a standardþ1 hedgehog is a Skyrmion (Rößler, Bogdanov, and Pfleiderer, 2006; Mühlbauer et al., 2009) and the director rotates from 0 at the coast all the way to the antipodal direction 0 in the interior, covering every orientation in between.”
Room-temperature chiral magnetic skyrmions in ultrathin magnetic nanostructures. (2016, background): “The skyrmion chiral property is generally driven [2, 6] by an additional anti-symmetric term in the exchange energy, namely the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), induced by the lack of structural inversion symmetry and the spin orbit coupling (SOC) [9, 10].”
Spin insulatronics (2020, background): “Magnetic skyrmions are emerging as a potential information carrier [53, 54].”