Skyrmions in van der Waals centrosymmetric materials with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions

Abstract

Skyrmions can appear in non-centrosymmetric material because of the non-vanishing Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI). In this paper, we study the magnetic properties of the rhombohedral MX${}_3$ (M: V, Cr, Mn, and Fe. X: Cl, Br, and I) van der Waals materials with centrosymmetric lattice by combining first-principles calculations and Monte Carlo simulations. We found that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya vector acting between the second nearest neighbor sites of the intra-layer is non-zero and quite large even in MX${}_3$ due to the breaking of the local inversion symmetry. We have found that the large DMI causes nano-scale magnetic vortexes, so-called skyrmions in MX${}_3$. The diameter of skyrmions, e.g., in CrCl${}_3$, is small, i.e., 2 nm, which is promising for the application of high-density magnetic memory devices. We have also found that not only conventional skyrmions in CrCl${}_3$ and VCl${}_3$ but also antiferromagnetic skyrmions in FeCl${}_3$ and meron in MnCl${}_3$ appear. Furthermore, we have found that the skyrmions in ClCl${}_3$ and VCl${}_3$ have a different helicity, which shows the possibility of controlling the helicity by electron/hole doping in MX${}_3$ materials. Van der Waals materials, which have a great advantage of high degrees of freedom in structures such as heterostructures and twisted structures, exhibit high potential as skyrmion materials.

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• Tailoring Robust Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect via Entropy-Engineering