Formation and growth of skyrmion crystal phase in a frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

Abstract

We study the formation and growth of a skyrmion crystal (SkX) phase in a frustrated antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a triangular lattice with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in the presence of an external magnetic field. We build phase diagrams in the temperature-field parameter plane, featuring first-order phase transitions and tricritical points, and study their evolution with the increasing DMI strength. It is found that already relatively small DMI intensity can lead to the appearance of the SkX phase at low temperatures in the vicinity of the meeting point of the remaining helical, coplanar up-up-down, and vortical-like ordered phases. By means of a parallel tempering (PT) Monte Carlo algorithm we find that the minimum value of DMI, at which the skyrmion phase emerges, $D_t\approx 0.02$, is one order of magnitude smaller then previously reported. We demonstrate the efficiency of PT in reliable and precise location of the phase boundaries between different phases separated by either very large (strong first-order transition) or barely detectable energy barriers, where the standard Monte Carlo approach may easily fail to find a stable solution.

22 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Spontaneous Skyrmion Ground States in Magnetic Metals
• Magnetic skyrmion logic gates: conversion, duplication and merging of skyrmions
• Spin eigen-excitations of an antiferromagnetic skyrmion
• Theoretical investigation of antiferromagnetic skyrmions in a triangular monolayer

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• Frustration-driven topological textures on the honeycomb lattice: antiferromagnetic meron-antimeron and skyrmion crystals emerging from spiral spin liquids
• Momentum-space theory for topological magnons in 2D ferromagnetic skyrmion lattices
• Skyrmionic qubits stabilized by Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction as platforms for qubits and quantum gates