Recent developments have led to an explosion of activity on skyrmions in three-dimensional (3D) chiral magnets. Experiments have directly probed these topological spin textures, revealed their nontrivial properties, and led to suggestions for novel a
pplications. However, in 3D the skyrmion crystal phase is observed only in a narrow region of the temperature-field phase diagram. We show here, using a general analysis based on symmetry, that skyrmions are much more readily stabilized in two-dimensional (2D) systems with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. This enhanced stability arises from the competition between field and easy-plane magnetic anisotropy and results in a nontrivial structure in the topological charge density in the core of the skyrmions. We further show that, in a variety of microscopic models for magnetic exchange, the required easy-plane anisotropy naturally arises from the same spin-orbit coupling that is responsible for the chiral Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. Our results are of particular interest for 2D materials like thin films, surfaces, and oxide interfaces, where broken surface-inversion symmetry and Rashba spin-orbit coupling naturally lead to chiral exchange and easy-plane compass anisotropy. Our theory gives a clear direction for experimental studies of 2D magnetic materials to stabilize skyrmions over a large range of magnetic fields down to T=0.
The electronic properties of the polar interface between insulating oxides is a subject of great current interest. An exciting new development is the observation of robust magnetism at the interface of two non-magnetic materials LaAlO_3 (LAO) and SrT
iO_3 (STO). Here we present a microscopic theory for the formation and interaction of local moments, which depends on essential features of the LAO/STO interface. We show that correlation-induced moments arise due to interfacial splitting of orbital degeneracy. We find that gate-tunable Rashba spin-orbit coupling at the interface influences the exchange interaction mediated by conduction electrons. We predict that the zero-field ground state is a long-wavelength spiral and show that its evolution in an external field accounts semi-quantitatively for torque magnetometry data. Our theory describes qualitative aspects of the scanning SQUID measurements and makes several testable predictions for future experiments.
