Triple-meron crystal in high-spin Kitaev magnets

Abstract

Spin textures with nontrivial topology hold great promise in future spintronics applications since they are robust against local deformations. The meron, as one of such spin textures, is widely believed to appear in pairs due to its topological equivalence to a half skyrmion. Motivated by recent progresses in high-spin Kitaev magnets, here we investigate numerically a classical Kitaev-$\Gamma$ model with a single-ion anisotropy. An exotic spin texture including three merons is discovered. Such a state features a peculiar property with an odd number of merons in one magnetic unit cell and it can induce the topological Hall effect.Therefore, these merons cannot be dissociated from skyrmions as reported in the literature and a general mechanism for such a deconfinement phenomenon calls for further studies. Our work demonstrates that high-spin Kitaev magnets can host robust unconventional spin textures and thus they offer a versatile platform not only for exploring exotic states in spintronics but also for understanding the deconfinement mechanism in the condensed-matter physics and the field theory.

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Beyond Kitaev physics in strong spin-orbit coupled magnets
• Skyrmion crystals in centrosymmetric triangular magnets under hexagonal and trigonal single-ion anisotropy
• Flavor-wave theory with quasiparticle damping at finite temperatures: Application to chiral edge modes in the Kitaev model
• Spontaneous dimerization, spin-nematic order, and deconfined quantum critical point in a spin-1 Kitaev chain with tunable single-ion anisotropy
• Topological phase transitions and thermal Hall effect in a noncollinear spin texture
• Chiral spin state and nematic ferromagnet in the spin-1 Kitaev-$\Gamma$ model
• Interplay of Kitaev Interaction and Off-diagonal Exchanges: Exotic Phases and Quantum Phase Diagrams
• Complex orders and chirality in the classical Kitaev-$\Gamma$ model
• Ferrimagnetism from quantum fluctuations in Kitaev materials
• Kitaev interactions in the van der Waals antiferromagnet VBr3
• Double-$Q$ and quadruple-$Q$ instabilities at low-symmetric ordering wave vectors under tetragonal symmetry
• Topological magnons in a non-coplanar magnetic order on the triangular lattice