Skyrmion fractionalization and merons in chiral magnets with easy-plane anisotropy
By Shizeng Lin, Avadh Saxena, C. Batista. 2014
174 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the equilibrium phase diagram of ultrathin chiral magnets with easy-plane anisotropy $A$. The vast triangular skyrmion lattice phase that is stabilized by an external magnetic field evolves continuously as a function of increasing $A$ into a regime in which nearest-neighbor skyrmions start overlapping with each other. This overlap leads to a continuous reduction of the skyrmion number from its quantized value $Q=1$ and to the emergence of antivortices at the center of the triangles formed by nearest-neighbor skyrmions. The antivortices also carry a small "skyrmion number" $Q_A \ll 1$ that grows as a function of increasing $A$. The system undergoes a first order phase transition into a square vortex-antivortex lattice at a critical value of $A$. Finally, a canted ferromagnetic state becomes stable through another first order transition for a large enough anisotropy $A$. Interestingly enough, this first order transition is accompanied by {\it metastable} meron solutions.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4cdf92622d140c77e2029e7a01b2cecc4f1d2a7
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Condensed Matter Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Skyrmion-electronics: writing, deleting, reading and processing magnetic skyrmions toward spintronic applications (2019, background): “For this reason, the bimeron is also referred to as a meron-antimeron pair [84, 332, 333] or an asymmetric skyrmion in easy-plane magnets [334, 335].”