Meron configurations in easy-plane chiral magnets

Abstract

We demonstrate the existence and study in detail the features of chiral bimerons which are static solutions in an easy-plane magnet with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction. These are skyrmionic textures with an integer topological charge and they present essential analogies to the meron configurations introduced in the context of quark confinement in the O(3) nonlinear sigma-model. We employ a Moebius transformation to show that, for weak chirality, bimeron configurations approach Belavin-Polyakov (BP) solutions characterized by tightly bound vortex and antivortex parts of the same size. Stronger chirality induces different vortex and antivortex sizes and also a detachment of merons, suggesting the possibility for a topological phase transition. Exploiting the fact that bimerons of opposite topological charges may exist in the same material, we demonstrate numerically a mechanism to generate meron pairs.

References in corpus (7)

• Skyrmions and Anomalous Hall Effect in a Dzyloshinskii-Moriya Spiral Magnet
• Skyrmion fractionalization and merons in chiral magnets with easy-plane anisotropy
• Rotating vortex dipoles in ferromagnets
• Dynamics of ferromagnetic bimerons driven by spin currents and magnetic fields
• Turning chiral skyrmion inside out
• The dynamics of bimeron skyrmions in easy-plane magnets induced by a spin supercurrent
• Neutron study of in-plane skyrmions in MnSi thin films

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Homochiral antiferromagnetic merons, antimerons and bimerons realized in synthetic antiferromagnets
• Topological invariants of vortices, merons, skyrmions, and their combinations in continuous and discrete systems