No Arabic abstract
Magnetic skyrmions are stable topological spin textures with significant potential for spintronics applications. Merons, as half-skyrmions, have been discovered by recent observations, which have also raised the upsurge of research. The main purpose of this work is to study further the lattice forms of merons and skyrmions. We study a classical spin model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, easy-axis, and in-plane magnetic anisotropies on the honeycomb lattice via Monte Carlo simulations. This model could also describe the low-energy behaviors of a two-component bosonic model with a synthetic spin-orbit coupling in the deep Mott insulating region or two-dimensional materials with strong spin-orbit coupling. The results demonstrate the emergence of different sizes of spiral phases, skyrmion and vortex superlattice in absence of magnetic field, furthered the emergence of field-induced meron and skyrmion superlattice. In particular, we give the simulated evolution of the spin textures driven by the magnetic field, which could further reveal the effect of the magnetic field for inducing meron and skyrmion superlattice.
Skyrmions represent topologically stable field configurations with particle-like properties. We used neutron scattering to observe the spontaneous formation of a two-dimensional lattice of skyrmion lines, a type of magnetic vortices, in the chiral itinerant-electron magnet MnSi. The skyrmion lattice stabilizes at the border between paramagnetism and long-range helimagnetic order perpendicular to a small applied magnetic field regardless of the direction of the magnetic field relative to the atomic lattice. Our study experimentally establishes magnetic materials lacking inversion symmetry as an arena for new forms of crystalline order composed of topologically stable spin states.
Chiral magnets are magnetically ordered insulators having spin scalar chirality, and magnons of chiral magnets have been poorly understood. We study the magnon dispersion and specific heat for four chiral magnets with Q=0 on the pyrochlore lattice. This study is based on the linear-spin-wave approximation for the S=1/2 effective Hamiltonian consisting of two kinds of Heisenberg interaction and two kinds of Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya interaction. We show that the three-in-one-out type chiral magnets possess an optical branch of the magnon dispersion near q=0, in addition to three quasiacoustic branches. This differs from the all-in/all-out type chiral magnets, which possess four quasiacoustic branches. We also show that all four chiral magnets have a gapped magnon energy at q=0, indicating the absence of the Goldstone type gapless excitation. These results are useful for experimentally identifying the three-in-one-out or all-in/all-out type chiral order. Then, we show that there is no qualitative difference in the specific heat among the four magnets. This indicates that the specific heat is not useful for distinguishing the kinds of chiral orders. We finally compare our results with experiments and provide a proposal for the three-in-one-out type chiral magnets.
Magnetic skyrmions are topological solitons with a nanoscale winding spin texture that hold promise for spintronics applications. Until now, skyrmions have been observed in a variety of magnets that exhibit nearly parallel alignment for the neighbouring spins, but theoretically, skyrmions with anti-parallel neighbouring spins are also possible. The latter, antiferromagnetic skyrmions, may allow more flexible control compared to the conventional ferromagnetic skyrmions. Here, by combining neutron scattering and Monte Carlo simulations, we show that a fractional antiferromagnetic skyrmion lattice with an incipient meron character is stabilized in MnSc$_2$S$_4$ through anisotropic couplings. Our work demonstrates that the theoretically proposed antiferromagnetic skyrmions can be stabilized in real materials and represents an important step towards implementing the antiferromagnetic-skyrmion based spintronic devices.
Periodical equilibrium states of magnetization exist in chiral ferromagnetic films, if the constant of antisymmetric exchange (Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction) exceeds some critical value. Here, we demonstrate that this critical value can be significantly modified in curved film. The competition between symmetric and antisymmetric exchange interactions in a curved film can lead to a new type of domain wall which is inclined with respect to the cylinder axis. The wall structure is intermediate between Bloch and Neel ones. The exact analytical solutions for phase boundary curves and the new domain wall are obtained.
We study the one-band Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice using a combination of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations and static as well as dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). This model is known to show a quantum phase transition between a Dirac semi-metal and the antiferromagnetic insulator. The aim of this article is to provide a detailed comparison between these approaches by computing static properties, notably ground-state energy, single-particle gap, double occupancy, and staggered magnetization, as well as dynamical quantities such as the single-particle spectral function. At the static mean-field level local moments cannot be generated without breaking the SU(2) spin symmetry. The DMFT approximation accounts for temporal fluctuations, thus captures both the evolution of the double occupancy and the resulting local moment formation in the paramagnetic phase. As a consequence, the DMFT approximation is found to be very accurate in the Dirac semi-metallic phase where local moment formation is present and the spin correlation length small. However, in the vicinity of the fermion quantum critical point the spin correlation length diverges and the spontaneous SU(2) symmetry breaking leads to low-lying Goldstone modes in the magnetically ordered phase. The impact of these spin fluctuations on the single-particle spectral function -- textit{waterfall} features and narrow spin-polaron bands -- is only visible in the lattice QMC approach.